weekend activity: revising

Outside the blazing Texan sun. I am here at Monkey Nest working on my chapbook and catching up a little bit on my poetry reading. If I ever get my chapbook published, I should thank the barristas and servers at Monkey Nest. It is here that I have revised most of my poems, written quite a few and have definitely read a lot. And incidentally, this coffee-shop happens to be one of the places I will miss once I leave Austin.

~What I Am Learning From This Revision Process~

A chapbook (or a book) is different from a poem. One has to think of the book as one complete text rather than one beautiful poem. So, many well-written poems might not end up being in the book, and it's okay. Because it's the book -- its relevance as a text and as a material artifact-- that counts. So, one of the things I learnt during this process, is to not get too attached to particular poems even if I love them as poems. I am learning to think of the chapbook in terms of a more complete narrative arc, and individual poems exist to give that narrative arc its complete shape. They embody that arc, so to say.

Sometimes, it might also happen that the specific arc needs some yet unwritten poems. For example, one of the feedbacks I got during the early days of this chapbook is that the mother figure of the text needs to be present outside of her kitchen. I had to sit down and think of what that would look like. I had to re-imagine that part of the arc, had to do some conceptual arc, and subsequently wrote some poems which addressed that particular concern. And, I believe, the chapbook is better for that. There is a dance between the mother's voice and the daughter's voice now that was absent in the early versions.

And this is why, I guess, revising can be really really hard often times. it demands that we move beyond that first moment of creative exhilaration and try to ask and answer the hard questions about the architecture of our work.

~Other Non-Writerly Updates~

I found a nice two-room apartment at Miami. Walking distance from campus.

I really love cheesecake. Especially berry flavored ones.