Reflection

 Preliminary matter: I'm going to start my work with poetry for 2015's National Poetry Writing Month by following prompts from the NaPoWriMo.Net web site. There are two prompts available currently, one of which I saw late last night and has been on my mind throughout the day. The other prompt, I guess, is the official prompt of the day, and it is to write a poem of negation, to essentially describe something in terms of what it is not. I might use that prompt at some point. For now, I would like to call up the prompt from last night.

    Here is the text, quoted from NaPoWriMo's site: "Take a look at this poem by Bernadette Mayer, a “New York School” poet whose highly influential book, Sonnets, was recently reissued by Tender Buttons Press. Like other poets associated with the New York School, Mayer pushed the boundaries of what poetry could be and could talk about, writing in a straightforward, highly vernacular style that belies the rhetorical complexity of the work. Mayer’s lamentation for the other lives we could have led is something we probably have all felt." .The prompt is to write a poem that begins with the opening line that Bernadette Mayer uses "I guess it's too late to live on a farm." Or, if you live on a farm (which I do), write from an opening line of "I guess it's too late to live in the city" or "on a boat."

    I am intrigued by this poem because the poet titles it as an essay. I also feel like I heard a riff on this poem a couple of years ago at the Renesselaerville Writers Festival, where the poet was lamenting the fact that it was too late to ride a pony. I spend a great deal of my own time imagining ways to live the other lives that I do not actually lead. I also spend a fair amount of time comforting myself about the fact that even if I am feeling a strain of lament, I probably have lived the life I wishing to lead at some point in the past. For instance, I cannot be too regretful about not living in a big city because I lived in big cities quite happily for many of my adult years and when I moved to the small, rural community where I live now I did so with the happy anticipation of being able to live out in the country on a farm. So the prompt set me off on a string of questions about life's regrets. What are those regrets, I wonder. How real are they? How deep?

    I also like the flow of this poem, and so I thought it might be interesting to write a poem that mimics this poem.

    So without further ado, that is what I am going to try.


Reflection, by Himanee Gupta-Carlson
    I guess it's too late to become a yoga instructor.
    I guess it's too late to move to India to study yoga.
    I guess it's too late to start teaching yoga.
    I guess it's too late to begin being a yoga instructor.
    I guess I'll never be a yoga instructor.
    I guess I'm too impatient to teach yoga.
    I guess I couldn't afford the teacher training workshops anyway.
    I guess we weren't all meant to be yoga instructors.
    I guess I'll never teach yoga now.
    I guess teaching yoga is not part of the plan now.
    I guess my husband wouldn't like to be the spouse of a yoga instructor.
    I guess I can't expect I'll ever teach yoga now.
    I guess I'll have to give up my dreams of teaching yoga now.
    I guess I'll never be a yoga instructor now.
    I couldn't be a yoga instructor anyway though I know people who have done the teacher training.
    Maybe someday I'll have a new yoga mat.
    I guess teaching yoga is really out.
    Showing students how to do yogic breaths and downward dog, walking between rows of bodies stretched out on mats
    I guess teaching yoga is just too difficult.
    I'll never teach yoga.
    Too much work and still to be a writer and college professor.
    Who are the professor yogis?
    Was there ever a professor who earned a living teaching yoga?
    All of the first yogis were learned people.
    But very few yogis are real professors,
    Perhaps some professors in the past were supporters of yogis.
    I guess professors tend to think more critically
    than the space of yogic breathing would allow.
    You could never introduce a round of sun salutations into a regular class.
    Or expect students with learning challenges or physical and mental disabilities to learn yoga in the way that I would like to teach it.
    I don't want to be a yoga instructor, but my mother was right:
    I shouldn't have forgotten about my Indian heritage. I should have remembered my roots.
    I am among the diaspora Indians who feel uncomfortable in yoga classes,
    taught by teachers with physical skills but uneducated into the systematic philosophy of yoga,
    unable to understand the holism of the practice with life.
    Steadfast as any philosophy and fixed in its precepts,
    providing a navigational wheel to guide us through migratory cycles of life.