August 12, 2025
This post is for a friend who asked when I would write about my writing classes which I had talked about in the previous post. It’s hurried but it’s a start.
I survived poetry class by tapping into my first year of karate.
The second assignment for my poetry class was to write a sonnet — in two days. I must have read sonnets in literature classes in school, but do non-Math/Science folks remember algebra from high school? I have friends who recite poetry and Shakespeare as easily as they breathe, even the spouse can recite a few things, but I don’t remember any poetry from school days except Tagore’s Where the Mind is Without Fear. On the Wednesday evening when the sonnet was introduced, I realised that I had trouble counting syllables accurately. And at the end of class, we were told to write a sonnet by Friday midnight. It felt impossible.
I decided to just focus on having 14 lines and the correct rhyming structure to construct my Shakespearean sonnet. I chose Gaza, Netanyahu, Trump, and Iran as the subject and managed to submit before the Friday midnight deadline though I was terrified of seeing it on the screen and reading it aloud the next morning, particularly since I have a fear of reading aloud anyway. We were doing a lot of writing in class and reading aloud our pieces—no compulsion—in the same class. I had decided to try to get past my fears and critics and read out my work too. It was easy to tell which of us had never written any poetry.
That Saturday morning the three or four English teachers in my class helped me sort out syllable count. Each had a different way of explaining and their combined explanations helped the impossible become possible. But of course, my submitted sonnet didn’t have the right syllable count and my voice trembled as I read it out that day. I got through. Later during that class the ghazal was introduced and that was the challenge that made me think I should drop out of the class.
And as I write about this, I see that I am focusing on the poetry class, I suppose because it was harder. Memoir flowed easily, the readings were enjoyable, the assignments doable, and the teacher had an extremely structured approach that helped me learn quickly. The first week’s assignment I worked on over two days and could submit two days before the deadline.
But ghazal week was different. I wrote and submitted a ghazal by the deadline. I got the comments back a day later. I read them out to the spouse at night. It was obvious that I had totally missed the essence of the ghazal which is to tap into the metaphysical and the eternal. But the comments were so detailed that the spouse quipped, Wow! I’m sure you can use these and rewrite easily.
Nope. I spend all my free time on the ghazal that week, using only 45 mins for the memoir assignment and barely remembered to read the memoir pieces. So, by the time I reached the third Saturday of classes the beached whale that I had felt in the first poetry class began to give up on its struggles to ever reach the waters again. Despite all that effort no revised ghazal had emerged. Luckily the second assignment for the week was one which could be completed in prose, so my critic was hushed.
I felt I had two choices—drop the class or continue going but not put any pressure on myself. I was leaning towards the first, until I remembered my first weeks of karate. I had the same feeling of ineptness, clumsiness, and hopelessness then. I don’t think I thought of dropping out but the hours before going to each class were filled with the same trepidation and the feeling of breathlessness. Huge fear combined with excitement too. I remembered plunging into the class without hesitation, even going to camp in week three. I remembered how Sensei Mistry didn’t test me until I had been there for eight months. Trust me, he said, and allow yourself time. Which I did then.
In karate as well as poetry class all belt levels trained together. I felt like a white belt in poetry as there were published poets in the class, one whose fifth book was coming out later in the year. The way they expressed and reacted to poems, all the in-class writing they read aloud, everything was at least a fourth degree or above black belt level. I could struggle on and on in poetry and spend less time on memoir as things felt more complex and speedy, but instead I wrote to the poetry instructor and asked if I could still come to class but not submit anything. I focused on doing the memoir assignments and readings which had also got more complex.
Of course, the poetry teacher agreed. I’m not happy about giving up the struggle to keep up in poetry, and am contemplating how I could have struggled on, but I was glad I could attend and enjoy the class pressure free. Maybe someday I will write more poetry, and poetry that is good. Maybe I will go back and write the other forms introduced like the haibun which felt so beautiful. Maybe one day I will write a decent ghazal. I did borrow a few poetry books and read them during class and poetry will be something that I will read more frequently now, even though some of it still feels like wandering through a dream in a foreign land and where a foreign language is spoken.
But July, my vacation from regular life is over and all the issues that I had kept at bay are occupying my being again. And though it is August my birthday month I don’t yet feel the excitement and hope of the month. The days feel bleah and tiring.
There is much more to mine from July 2025. That poetry class was incomparable to any other writing class I have done. With so many more ‘black belt’ poets than beginners it was a space where I saw how ‘real’ writers operated. Most classes before had a mixture of all levels and my comfort level in those was average or better. Most classes before had twenty-plus students so it was easy to stay in my comfort zone, but in the poetry class there were only ten of us, and no place to 'hide' from myself. Also, both teachers were especially warm and encouraging in their own different ways and the sense of possibility in terms of writing has grown immensely in the month. Needs further unfolding.
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