Next week in my Women and Gender studies class we have a paper due that explores intersectionality in everyday campus life, developing  your own case study and analysis. The paper will rethink “everyday practices underpinning racism, genderism, classism and other -isms” in the university environment with a focus upon your own discipline/major.

I thought to myself, what could I possibly write about that involves these said issues that also relates to my major (English creative writing). I was stumped for a while, thinking about what my major has to do with intersectionality. But then I was reminded of David Herd’s, “Through”. David Herd’s collection of poetry deals with politics and the various ways it can be echoed.

This brought to me to my paper topic and that poetry can be used to express ones political views, emotions, privilege, etc., and this relates back to intersectionality. I am also arguing that what a person may write may spark interest and potentially bring rise to a movement or start a new passion for someone who is reading said poem. Poetry can be written and read in various forms and I believe it allows one to explore intersectionality in a creative and artistic manor.

It was really weird to write a poem that had a set form before I started to write it. I usually write all of my poetry by way of free-writing.  Everything I write comes with no thought to form until after it is written. It was really cool to see how writing with a pre-determined form helped me to write a poem. It was fun to write in a different way but I definitely prefer writing free verse.

In these stressful times, I wonder what will become of the 2010’s, and how we will we be written about in history textbooks. Along with that thought, I wonder how we as older people will explain our actions and our thoughts about this moment we are living in. I’ve been thinking a lot about the poem “First They Came” by Martin Niemoller. It’s almost been like a mantra.

Continue reading “A Poem I’ve Been Thinking a Lot About Lately”

Most of my poems make me nervous because the genre feels very flexible.  Almost too flexible. The different forms and paths you can take a poem down sometimes overwhelm me. This is one reason why I love reading the different rewrites of my poems (S/O to Abby, Mya, and Sarah) because it helps me get a better feel for what I stand to gain and lose by altering the form of my poems.

I think my first post on this blog was in regards to my bewilderment at the different choices some of you make for your poems, in terms of form. I think I still largely feel the same way now. There’s so many choices that feel very deliberate and thought out for others’ poetry, and this concerns me, because most of the formal techniques I use in my poems are just sort of instinctual. Some of the feedback I got on that first blog post was that many of you feel similarly, and that form often does come from a place of instinct. However, instinct is sort of the opposite of revision. Revision is where you question every instinct you have and force yourself to justify those instincts.

I haven’t tried to revise my poems yet. I’ve given it some thought, but I don’t quite feel ready to sit down and start hacking them up. Not because I feel overly attached to them, but because poetry feels overly flexible to me. When I revise prose, I usually think in terms of scenes. Which scenes are essential, how they drive the story, etc. Perhaps I just trust my prose instincts more and that’s why poetry feels overwhelming. I feel like I know what my prose pieces want (whether I execute that is another matter), but I find my poems speak in quieter tones. I can’t always hear their desires. That whole concept of knowing what a poem wants, rather than what the author wants, feels very abstract to me anyways.

So, as I head into the process of revising my poems, I want to know how you all go about that process yourself. Do you have any methods you return to when revising your poetry, or does it feel instinctual to you?

****Warning! This post contains spoilers for the Kindergarten Teacher!!!!!*******

A couple of weeks ago my friends and I watched the Kindergarten Teacher because we heard it was about poetry and were excited to see where the movie went with this topic. As we watched the movie, we found that the protagonist became increasingly obsessed with one of her students, who she believed was incredibly gifted at poetry. At the same time as this discovery, we learn that she also is interested in poetry, and even attended a weekly poetry class in the hope of improving her craft. While her poetry was never really complimented amongst others she sees the young student’s potential and decides that she needs to nurture this boy, in a way that would further harness his talent. While she still writes some poetry at this time, she is much more interested in what the boy has to say, even to the point of substituting his work as her own in class to see how her teacher would rate it. While all of this is happening, we can clearly see that this obsession is unhealthy and that it is taking the teacher away from many elements of her established life, losing attentiveness over her family and career, and in many situations prioritizing the boy’s poetry over those previous responsibilities.

What I found most interesting is the aspect of her losing touch of her life in order to pursue the boy’s poetic genius. I thought it was especially interesting that to her, abandoning the responsibilities in her life would improve her worth as an artist. For her, this detachment was something that could lead to being better in touch with poetry. In my experience, gaining better attachment to what is going on in my life in delving deeper into my relationships with others and myself, help improve my poetry. I think if I was to completely detach myself from aspects of my life, and try to write poetry without those aspects it would be incredibly hard (unless I wrote about the process of trying to detach from everything) and even if I did produce something I don’t think it would feel very organic to my writing style. I believe that writing is another way of interacting with the world rather than trying to isolate a craft from anything I would consider normal in my life.

Even though this is my main motivation for writing, I would love to know what other people think about the reason they write. Also if someone writes out of a detachment of their surrounds I would love to know about that as well!

My partner Noah is both a lover of as well as constructive critic of my work, and for this I appreciate him a lot. He’s not afraid to say this is really good and I don’t understand this in the same breath, and furthermore, he’s not afraid to say this is not your best work and this would make it better.

Naturally, I use email to send him a lot of my work, and I often write funny little comments in the email’s text. But what I’ve been doing for a while now is typing “pome” as the subject text and then simply saying “a pome” as the email message with the attachment. I’m not sure when this started, but he and I have a history of purposely fudging words. “Yocky” in place of “yucky” was a childhood misspeech for him, but soon we’d find ourselves saying “bogs” (for insects) and extending our vowels in all sorts of ways to sound funny. We have a similar sense of humor, so this tends to work. I like how “pome” sounds like “poem” but softer; it’s shortened to one syllable and immediately brings to mind my favorite Christmas fruit, whose seeds are seen through a translucent ruby exterior which is juicy and tart and sweet, and crunches when bitten. If a poem is anything like a pomegranate then I would say it’s wonderfully successful. (Ironically, “pome” generally indicates apples or pears, not pomegranates, but the latter always come to mind first upon hearing the word. Connotations, what can I say.)

Continue reading “a silly story about my boyfriend, and a Robert Hass pome”

So about that book… that I uh… ‘borrowed’.

Just kidding, it will be put back safe and sound next week (most likely).

You see here, Maria Lima is my adviser — and never have I ever had a meeting on time with her. This is a fortunate thing, because it allows me to browse the Welles/English Department library. I always noticed the books on the shelf, but never actually got up to take one down. This past Wednesday was different. I found an April 2016 Poetry Magazine — and started reading. The poetry was extremely refreshing. I want to talk specifically about my favorite poem in the magazine, which I am pasting below.

Maybe I’m just not that argumentative, but argument(/persuasion?) never occurred to me as a motivation for writing poetry before. Well, that’s not entirely true. I think we’re all always trying to argue, if not justify our or our speakers’ point of view, emotions, and experiences. Articulation is what I always thought the ultimate goal of poetry was, not that an argument can’t be articulated (that may be the only thing an argument can be).  It’s up to the reader to let my words in, where as arguments command entry. Arguments came to me as secondary to the content, probably because I thought of arguments as content. But, now looking to things like Through and sonnets, I think of arguments as a form that works beside the content rather than behind it.

All this ties into our discussions of politics. I think politics boils down to interaction of ideas using people as the medium. Ideas only matter if we share them, after all. But I’m not so sure the people part is so necessary. It may be more akin to the interaction of ideas through language. In that sense, poetry is just an interface for ideas to collide as much as presidential debates or dinner tables.

That being said: if arguments are a form, then politics dominate content even if they lack content.

Politics still scares me some, though. Mostly in the sense that politics (more so than general arguments) is rhetorical/can be refuted and that there’s more to the world than language. Feelings can’t really be refuted and language is only a tool for description. Language is more like a container than its contents. Rhetoric scares me. Rhetoric is using language for language’s sake; it takes a step past interaction into the realm of persuasion. I don’t really want to change anyone’s mind. Politics is such a weak force compared to experience. So, I’d rather deal in experiences. Language interests me insofar as it communicates experiences, not so much in the ways we use it. I’m still interested in politics because of its ubiquity, but I can’t see it as anything beyond a means to an end. Language is such a funny thing, still; it’s the best way we have to communicate ideas, but by that same token its the very thing that muddies ideas. We’d be perfectly articulate without the need for language, but we need it and we have to deal with it.

This one was felt like it really rambled, but maybe that helped my argument in a hyperbolic sort of sense?

Thanks for reading.

As a black women, it is impossible for me not to think of my body as inherently making a statement. It takes up space and receives judgement, whether it be good or bad. It’s really hard for me to voice the feelings that society has given me about my body into a poem. I feel like in conversation because my thoughts are so scattered on the topic, it is easier for me to articulate myself because a conversation is more fluid. With a poem, I feel like my thoughts have to be more fleshed out and specific. The words have to be more exact because I can’t really explain myself more if all people have to go off is the poem and nothing more. I am always hesitant to write a politically charged poem because I don’t think my message will come off exactly the way I want it to and these are topics that I don’t want their to be any confusion on my intent.

In light of midterms coming up, I’ve noticed a very strong political undercurrent, the likes I have never witnessed before. Of course I’ve seen it during 2008 (age 10) , 2012 (age 14), and 2016 (age 18), but I’ve never seen this high stakes fervor in the midterms. I don’t intend to go in depth about the state of politics in our country, which I can happily discuss in person or in a message conversation. I’m intending to write about how this impacts me as a writer, and how I mused about this as I was writing the poem for my writing assignment.

Continue reading “Midterms (no, not the exams)”