The poem, alive

These past few weeks, I’ve been feeling poetry in a different way. Maybe it’s workshop, maybe it’s because of the literary organizations that I’ve decided to join, maybe it’s something happening to me neurologically that I could not pinpoint without an MRI. Maybe it’s all of the above. Whatever it is, it is a marked point in a lifetime when one starts to think in poetry, feel in poetry, and move in poetry. No, I am not a walking precocious self-proclaimed poetry prophet, but I’m definitely a little different. It happens in moments rather than states. It’s a flitting feeling. But it’s pretty rad when it happens.

It’s all in the interaction. This past Friday I had the awesome privilege of helping out Guerrilla in the set up of their poetry installment in the Rochester Fringe Festival. On a cold and rainy afternoon (when I very conveniently decided to wear Birkenstock sandals) I helped haul 20-pound hand-painted magnetic boards and place laminated anonymous poems onto wet tables with unyeilding sticky tack while questioning the well-being of my bare toes and watching strangers fiddle with my words.

There’s something so present about moving actual words around on a board, wiping off the water from laminated sheets of poems, and watching the ink drip from stanzas as the unlamented counterparts flap on the fences of the Spiegel Garden. People say that poetry is physical, but right there poetry was truly PHYSICAL. Poetry was transforming, both from natural and human interactions. Lines were changing and living in different universes, but the individual words of the poem rang with the same truth, as if the words had a character of their own, unchangeable by the changing of order.

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Bridge to Poetry

This post is me trying to figure out where the disconnect between me and poetry is. Or where the connection is, because there must be one…right?

I appreciate how creative and aesthetic poetry can be, but so far not much poetry has fed my soul. I like reading things I gain a deep understanding of, whether the understanding is more on an intellectual, emotional or spiritual level. Just as long as I feel changed or feel like I gained something after reading, I am usually satisfied. However, poetry to me often feels like it’s hiding something rather than revealing something. Perhaps the action of hiding itself reveals something, but so much seems hidden from me that it frustrates me.

The art of revealing more through less – now that I think about it, that is actually something truly admirable. Too often, perhaps, I scramble to find as many words as I can to accurately describe the exact message I want to convey. When I write a poem, I often feel as if I need to deliberately hide something I want to express, or express it in a less complete way. However, I know that good poetry expresses an image/images, and part of the beauty is how different people could interpret these images in so many unique ways, or even get different images from the same poem – if a picture is worth a thousand words, than a good poem could possibly be worth a million words. Instead of thinking of a message I want to convey before I sit down to write a poem, perhaps I should just start visualizing images and writing them down, and then discover the meaning behind the images and connect them in a way that makes sense to me.

Okay. I think I feel a bit less intimidated by having to write poems after breaking down a possible process of writing it – see the images, write down the images, connect the images.

Transcending and learning patience

I am now in a place where I am wondering how I could explore my identity through poetry while at the same time make sure that readers are able to determine the underlying message about the bigger issues happening in the world in regards to human expression and current events. This brings me to the question, how can I weave my exploration of self, philosophy, and the things I learn from observing the world around me, without losing my reader in musings about my personal life and abstractions?

This past year I have felt a mental block whenever I write. When I was younger, I would put my pen to paper and the words would flow right out. But now, I am understanding that what I previously thought was a mental block is actually an awareness that my poetry is no longer just for me, and because of that I am more aware and more careful about what I write on the page. That means that my poems require more time, more research and more introspection on my behalf.

What I am struggling with right now, and I am hoping is not a decision I have to make any time soon is choosing a subject to dedicate my poems to outside of myself. The work I have to do is implement both my personal perspective, while informing the reader about the world around them in order to inspire, reveal, or bring about change. While my personal emotions and recollections can be inspiring to some by themselves, I am beginning to think that it isn’t exactly fair to just have someone read a poem for the sake of feeling like my personal thoughts are important enough to read about. While I thought once upon a time that this kind of poetry was about connectedness and bringing someone into my own world or creating empathy, the question I am currently struggling with is, what makes my world worth stepping into?

Throughout my time as a poet, I have lacked a sort of focus. I have always tried to squeeze all my ideas onto a single poem and I have tried to rush the process. What time has taught me is that anything good takes patience, it cannot be done impatiently. There is nothing really more important waiting for you than the product that will come out of taking your time with something.

A Train of Thought

For the past few months, I’ve been struggling with the topics in my writing which my brain has been leading me to (if that made any sense at all). I feel I write too much about specific aspects of my life that, at this point, I’d rather put to rest.

Evidently, this is where my mind and I disagree. Because even when I try to write about other topics, I can’t help but return to the older topics, and I feel as though I am writing the same story from different angels: kid leads shitty life because of x, y, and z, grow up to be a messed up adult dealing with a, b, and c… It’s actually kind of annoying.

The idea of seeing things with one eye that we do not see with the second resonated with me. No, I doubt the writer was referring to anything PTSD/trauma related… but I liked the idea anyway, and am hijacking it for the sake of this post.

I’ve worked with both foster kids and adult-aged drug addicts via internships, and something I’ve noticed in both groups is they each have dealt with trauma through their lives. The kids (aging anywhere between infants to ~21) generally don’t register their own trauma. They may talk about it, but it’s like they’re just stringing words together that they’ve heard without understanding. This is how trauma is seen in the eyes of children. The adults have a greater understanding of whatever trauma they faced as adults. Even if they can’t put words to what happened, you can tell that they–through their older eyes–have a clearer picture of what happened.

And this is where writing about trauma get difficult. Trying to write from both eyes, the younger and the older. Viewing the image from the younger, but analyzing with the older.

I have no idea where I’m going with this. There’s my train of thought.

Where Do You Get Your Inspiration From?

Hey friends,

I’ve been considering lately the different places from which we, as artists, draw our inspiration from, mainly for the purpose of borrowing ideas for potential muses from other artists. So what inspires or informs upon your writing or other creative endeavors? For me, I love writing when I’m out in nature, although I haven’t gone out in a long time. The writing itself, however, is often prompted from snippets of conversation I hear or some interesting word or phrase I read. I usually can’t write with music on, but I love looking up lyrics or listening to other poets and mimicking their styles.

So, I’ll admit, I have an ulterior motive for making this blog post. I’m also writing another blog post for another class (Editing & Production/Gandy Dancer) and I need your help! If you’re willing for your response to be reproduced on the Gandy Dancer site, please indicate so somewhere in your reply so that we can spread the inspiration! If not, then no worries, I’m still curious for my own personal sake.

 

Scattering the Pieces of an Image

One thing I struggle with in my poems is to have a sense of urgency to one image – or have an image that tells a story and gets across one very specific feeling. In a lot of the things I write, one specific image isn’t central even when I want it to be, or the wordiness of the rest of the poem overshadows the images themselves.

Something my friend and fellow poet Evan suggested during a workshop was to read David Roderick’s collection The Americans—and he specifically pointed out this short poem in the collection:

Dear Suburb,

Just once I’d like to come home
to find that you’ve scattered the pieces
of a saxophone all over my bed.

Looking at the pieces of the poem, it’s a bunch of different things – a letter to a suburb, a claim of frustration, the want for destruction, something about music, etc. But all together, in the one short stanza, it becomes something else entirely. I’ve been trying to emulate this kind of thing in my own poetry, but can never quite get it—I’m historically terrible at writing very short poems and being able to make them meaningful, but referencing Roderick’s writing has helped me start to assess the necessary pieces needed to make the images pop. What is it about those individual parts that, when read as one, make them transcend into a very specific emotion? Why the saxophone specifically? How would the image have changed if it had been a violin scattered on the bed? Did he stress about the kind of instrument for as long as I’ve thought about certain words in my poems?

This poem, like the ones I’ve been struggling through in my writing, exists in a series of poems titled Dear Suburb, as well as in the collection itself, which has made me start to wonder if images change when presented alongside other poems. If we had read Pound’s Metro Station immediately after reading Whitman’s Song of Myself, would Pound’s image have become something different, or is the image such a perfect objective correlative that the feeling it represents remains the same regardless of the environment? Is that something we should strive for our images to be, something that can remain the same regardless of what happens around it?

I’ve been muddling through all of these questions in the past couple weeks (and months, even) as I’ve examined the central images in my poem, or the lack thereof. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on whether it’s helpful to break the image down into pieces, or if our interpretations of image based poems change depending on their surroundings!

Verb Repository

 

This past week I’ve been thinking about two things, both related to words. The first is Pound’s defense of small words in poetry, and his argument that simple language can be effective language when handled correctly. The second thing was Richardson’s stance on using strong verbs, something I don’t think often enough about in my writing. For this reason, I decided to compile a list of short and (hopefully) image-provoking verbs to combine both these trains of thought.

Alert, attach, auction, babble, balk, barf, baste, bathe, bellow, bleach, blind, blot, bolt, burnish, cajole, caution, chide, clip, coast, coil, comb, counter, covet, crochet, croak, cycle, dam, deal, decay, desert, deter, dial, dive, drill, drone, dupe, dust, dye, earn, elope, emit, expel, extol, face, falter, fasten, fax, fence, file, fire, floss, flower, fret, fry, fume, gag, gather, gild, glue, grease, grow, growl, grunt, gurgle, gush, hammer, harness, heap, hoot, hover, hum, hurry, ice, inflate, infuse, inspect, irritate, iron, itch, jab, jeer, jest, kid, knell, knit, knock, knot, laminate, last, level, lick, list, loan, linger, lisp, mail, mar, mend, meow, mix, mop, mutter, nag, nail, nap, nest, ogle, oil, paddle, paint, paste, pause, peck, pelt, pester, phone, plant, pry, quilt, retire, rock, sack, sail, savor, scrape, seal, shriek, shrug, singe, ski, slink, slow, smoke, snarl sneeze, snicker, snore, sow, spark, squirt, stammer, stamp, strain, strum, sway, swoop, tame, tear, thaw, toast, tow, trim, trounce, upstage, usurp, vacuum, venture, vouch, wallow, wash, weave, wink, wrap, Xerox, yellow, zest, zero, zincify, zip, zone.

 

 

The Language of Poets and Philosophers

While reading the piece on image by Philip, I found myself thinking of something my German professor said on the first day of our 101 class a couple of years ago—That German is the language of poets and philosophers.

Philip discusses images behind individual words, but something he forgets to do, and something I see a lot of people within the English speaking world forget to do, is to look at the image/s brought up by the sentence as a whole. While languages such as German put strenuous rules on individual words (e.g. gendered nouns, various cases), English compensates for its lack of gender and cases by forming a very strict sentence structure: Noun, verb, preposition, possible second proposition, object—e.g. “he went to the store.”

German, on the other hand, has only one grammatical law: That the verb must be in the second place of the sentence, with the subject right beside it. So while in German it would be grammatically correct for me to say “The store went the man to,” English-speaking people would likely assume I’ve just had a stroke. In English, we put most of our emphasis on the subject—“the man went to the store.” While this more common in the German language, it is equally correct for me to put that same amount to emphasis on another part of the sentence—“the store went the man to.” The latter sentence forces the reader to look at the store first, thereby subtly altering the image behind the sentence in a way the English language simply cannot do, and thereby embracing a certain amount of creativity and meaning the English language lacks.

Learning About Yourself Through the Image

After class on Tuesday I began thinking about the comment one of our classmates made about my poem. Specifically the line “hands folded over bellyfolds.” She said that she interpreted it as a representation of self-consciousness, and that’s what I intended for it to be at the time I wrote the poem. It surprised me how such a direct image was interpreted as something more abstract by most of my classmates, when in fact I intended it to be exactly what it said. A girl with her hands folded over her stomach. Usually this position is taken in instances of discomfort or impatience, and I wonder if as poets we tend to think about a phrase so thoroughly that we forget its simpler meaning.

But what this comment sparked most of all were thoughts about how an image can teach me about myself. Because, yes I intended the image to be a representation of self-consciousness, but I had not thought about my intentions until my poem was being workshopped. And I would not have been able to put my intentions into the exact words our classmate did. Which means that even though subconsciously I was aware that the image represented self-consciousness, I was not consciously aware until someone pointed it out to me.

Which brings me to my main point about how the images we write in our poems, transcribed through a personal lens, are representative of ourselves. Why have I seen this image in this specific way? Why am I describing it with these words? What does this say about me, my mental/emotional state, my past, my present, and the life I have led? And finally, why is this image wanting to come out in my poem? What does my writing want to tell me about myself and the way I see the world? Our writing in general, knows us better than we know ourselves. Through it we are able to see ourselves and evaluate those things which we seem to deny or be blind to.

So this girl, with hands folded over belly folds is important because she reveals to me a part of myself I deny, that is a girl who is self-conscious and who feels the need to fight against that. And that’s part of why I love writing because through it I learn about myself and heal.

What kind of music do you make?

The reading for today’s class, Rachel Richardson’s “Learning Image and Description,” sparked a newfound interest in sound for me. I have always noticed that in order to make a poem resonate well with its audience, the sound and momentum of the words must be in sync with its message. This is something that I’ve always been in awe of when hearing poetry. At slam poetry shows, I would be so in tune with the poet’s emotions because of the way that the poem sounded (although of course much of this also lends itself to the fact that the poet is performing.) But even in a poem that is meant to be read, rather than performed (the latter is subjective), like Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird,” we can hear sounds as a bird takes flight. The depth of what it means to be  caged bird is pronounced because of the way that the flutter and breeze in its flight create a melody.

I’ve been looking into how to improve this in my own poetry. I ask myself questions, “Must I be a musician to write poetry?” Rhythm isn’t something that I’ve ever been good at. Two left feet have haunted me my entire life. Only recently, enlightened by the culture of places I’ve been to, have I been able to properly whine, capturing the tick-tock of the reggae. Before I only imitated. How can I produce the same success in my writing?

Perhaps with some writers it is just natural. A sort of vomiting of utterances and emotions that fall upon the page in the form of a tune. Do you guys have any thoughts and advice? Richardson mentions that the images in poems work because of their music: “Do they make music together? A percussive rhythm, an alliterative lull, an onomatopoetic evocation?” But how can I better form these images through music?