The Contemporary Poem

I learned poetry through hip-hop. I didn’t grow up quoting Virgil and Wordsworth, but dipping class and cyphering with my friends, imitating the flow-schemes of Big L and Nas. Standing on the glossy wooden benches of the boy’s locker room, we’d unfold wrinkled sheets of notebook paper with blotted ink squiggled across its pages, jagged handwriting containing our rhymes about the 21^st century teenage life. While the content was typically restricted to misogyny and glorifying drug use, my interests in the world around me permeated through the lyrics: “we need less Jihadis and more Mahatma Ghandis”

My punkish angst caught somewhere between the suicidal lyrics of Senses Fail and “N.Y. State of Mind” found body in lyrically tapdancing across rhythmic 808s and YouTube beats humming through my headphones and a portable speaker. It taught me that poetry was above all else, supposed to say something. Pompous emphasis. Elaborate surprises. Express one of two extremes, either the shear meaninglessness of everything or the absolutely undeniable awesomeness of yourself and your life. Mix proving you’re the GOAT with a knack for reckless behavior because “who cares” and you’ll get a taste for the origins of my poetic sentiment.

For a while I stopped rapping. Granted, I had bigger issues than a lack of creativity considering I was blowing lines of heroin four years ago and dealing with a whole lotta spiritual vexation. Yet once I had my house placed back in order by Jesus, and had my entire worldview flipped inside out, I now channel that lingering youthful poetic sentiment into prose and art that reflects a rightly placed pomp on the glory of God.

I love translating abstract academic concepts into narratives, I love singing sounds and phonemes about the world into rhythm, and I love pulling apart the symbolic depictions of our diction.

A surprise to no one, my introduction to poetry was music. My eighth grade English teacher was the first teacher I had who taught poetry in his class. He explained poetry to us as music. Mr Mo was awesome, and he let us listen to our iPods while we wrote poetry because he said the music would inspire us. I was so happy to be allowed to have my iPod in class, that I took these poetry assignments seriously. This introduction to poetry made me have a huge focus on sound in my poems. I am admittedly nervous for the class to read my poem out loud because it won’t sound like it does in my head. That’s a good thing, it’ll let me learn how it sounds to other people at least.

Because I took the poetry assignments seriously, Mr Mo decided to invite me to perform in the high school poetry slam. That was a huge deal to me as a lowly eighth grader. I didn’t win, but I got to hang out with a bunch of high school poets. Basically I thought I was the coolest kid alive. I threw myself into poetry after that. I was a Button Poetry and Brave New Voices addict. It wasn’t until tenth grade that I really encountered classic poetry and forms other than free-verse and slam poetry.

I stopped writing poetry almost entirely when I got to college. Nearly four years later, I’m in two poetry writing classes. I’ve learned that my introduction to poetry back in middle school has definitely stuck with me. I still write all my poems while listening to music. I also tend to read my poem out loud as I write it to see how each syllable and phoneme sounds exactly how I want it to. The difference between now and then is that I am slowly starting to care about how the poem looks on the page. The first poem I submitted for workshop has the beginning of every line capitalized and little to no punctuation. That wasn’t on purpose. It didn’t occur to me to care about how it looks. The look of a poem is something that doesn’t matter in slam poetry. I never thought that anyone would read my poems. In the past, people have only ever heard me read my own poems in slams. It’s interesting to think back to eighth grade with Mr Mo, my beat up composition notebook, and my iPod Shuffle. It makes me feel really nostalgic.

I have always been drawn to words in regards to spelling, writing essays, and learning new meanings in the English language. This started as early as 2nd grade when I remember writing a lengthy “How to make chocolate chip cookies” recipe essay while other kids around me struggled with reading and writing. Ever since then, I have been tremendously drawn to writing and the topic of English.

By the time I was in high school, I pushed myself when it came to English class and learned as much as I could; from reading “Catcher in the Rye” freshman year, to writing my own personal college essay senior year. On my own time, I took to pencil and paper and experimented with rhyming, writing and poetry. With no specific source or inspiration, I wrote small poems and prose as I dabbled into this new exciting hobby. Coming to college, I knew I had to dedicate a good chunk of my time to English.

After taking ENGL 102 and ENGL 201, I knew that poetry was for me. I had learned the in’s and out’s of how a workshop was run and fell in love with Geneseo even more when I heard that they offered a poetry workshop. I applied and was accepted. Not ever was there a doubt in my mind that this was something I didn’t want to do, but on the other hand, I was a bit nervous about the advanced level I was getting myself into. So far, we are about 5 classes in and my nerves have gone away. I am learning more than I would have realized from our thoughtful classroom discussions, outside class readings, and peer editing students work.

• anything & everything I am feeling (events in my life that I need to digest)
• Jack Kerouac (On The Road, The Subterraneans); books that were introduced to me when I first started taking writing seriously, around the tenth grade of high school
• drugs
• Egon Schiele (an Austrian painter, known for his distorted & ugly portrayel of the human body); first fell in love with his work when I visited Vienna in 2016
• Maya Angelou (mainly her memoirs)
• Jean-Michel Basquiat (paintings Untitled & In Italian); one of the first artists I learned of when visiting museums as a child
• butterflies; I had those ‘butterfly pet’ kits when I was younger, and ever since then I have seen them as a symbol (specifically monarch butterflies)
• Alternative Music (Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, St. Vincent, Fleet Foxes, Big Thief, Elliott Smith, Beach House, Cigarettes After Sex, Keaton Henson, The Japanese House, Jeff Buckley, Mitski, Nick Drake, Soccer Mommy, Regina Spektor, Cavetown, etc)
• Hip Hop (Kid Cudi, Blood Orange, 03 Greedo, Future, NAV, Playboi Carti, Travis Scott, Kanye West, Young Thug, The Weeknd, etc)
• Movies (The Lovely Bones, Amelie, Howl’s Moving Castle, 500 Days of Summer, Switch, Zodiac, Donnie Darko, etc)
• Eyes (I have always been extremely interested in what others eyes can expose, and use this idea in a lot of my poetry)
• Poets (Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Yeats, Charles Bukowski, Mary Oliver, etc)

One source of source of inspiration for writing I’ve found,  surprisingly, is Twitter. Sometimes people will write or share very short, very abstract, outlandish jokes, to stick out other posts, and those end up being incredible in syntax, they must carry enough power and weight to grab your attention. People began compiling them before they’re lost in the mix: dumb snippets like “tell me the name of god you fungal piece of..” that are obviously jokes, but still carry weight. But Twitter people will often share snippets they find anywhere. I remember, someone had shared a photo of a church sign that read like “I want to be so full of Christ that even mosquitoes will say ‘there is power in the blood.’” A bunch of ads, or billboards are also potent, they have to give the same impact, with the same short space. Each word carries multitudes.

                I find a lot of inspiration from surrealist and abstract paintings- the texture of brushstrokes, blending colors, the implications of shapes and contrast inspire me, I try to capture that same “texture” in words, I guess you’d call it. Cubist paintings especially have a wild shape, I want to try and make my writing feel the same.

                One source that always inspires me, but I can never really capture well is the geometry of mindsets, the relations between people and perception. I always try to imagine thoughts and feelings and impulses as physical things. How do they interact? What symbol represents this type of mindset, what is gratitude shaped like, as an object? What motion/texture does it have?  I haven’t run out of this as inspiration yet, so it must not be completely bankrupt.

• My emotional state
• My complex relationship with my mother
• The real-life things I’m processing (or at least trying to process- is this too vague? I feel like it’s pretty apparent in each individual poem.)
• The advice column of The Cut
  • https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/ask-polly-why-are-the-guys-i-date-so-boring.html
  • https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/ask-polly-why-should-i-keep-going.html#
• Catapult Articles 
  • https://catapult.co/stories/take-care-mothers-daughters-and-inheriting-self-hatred
  • https://catapult.co/stories/my-friend-died-of-cancer-but-lives-in-moss
  • https://catapult.co/stories/talking-to-your-kids-about-astronomical-phenomena-shayne-terry
• Biblical imagery & poetics, but also the more abstract concepts of God, faith, and creation
• My stupid friends and their stupid choices
• ‘Class of 2013’, ‘A Pearl’, and ‘Jobless Monday’ by Mitski
• Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
• My own journal entries (especially when I’m talking about my mother)
• My friends who are scientists and their insights on things (meteor showers, hydrothermal systems, the eye gene on fruit flies)
• ‘Life on Mars?’ by David Bowie
• Liana Finck and Meredith W. Park’s illustrations 
• Jenny Slate’s collection of essays, Little Weirds
• The Arctic climate (and the antarctic climate)
• My childhood home and the ghosts that stay with my mother
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show ‘Fleabag’
• Lorde’s ‘400 Lux’ and ‘No Better’
• The struggle to be authentic

Traffic. I love sitting in traffic, particularly at night when all the lights blend together. My eyes tend to glaze over, and all the lights spread out. I think this is the part where I also admit to accidentally rear-ending someone because I was zoned out staring at the lights. Back home, there is no shortage of traffic. There is not a single freeway that is truly free. It takes your time. (If you like wasting money, you can also go in the FasTrak lanes where you pay to sit in traffic.) Sitting in traffic gives me time to think, and it also gives me time to stare at the person right next to me. People do the weirdest things when they’re essentially trapped in the car, but I’ve also seen a woman apply red lipstick while she was going 90 mph in her Lexus. I like to look at people and imagine their life stories and where they have to go. It feels so surreal knowing you can’t move. I like capturing that feeling of helplessness in my poems. 

I find that same feeling when swimming in open water. I find it funny that I can’t stand to swim in a lake, but I absolutely love the feeling of swimming in the ocean. It’s freeing, but at the same time, you are helpless. I don’t know about you, but I definitely can’t swim long enough to survive if I was stranded in the middle of the ocean. One of my favorite places is Fisherman’s Cove. I do a lot of snorkeling there because there is a sharp drop in the water where you can see a lot of fish without going far into the water. I’m probably only fifteen feet from the shore, but everything is so different. The fish seemed unfazed by my presence unless I try to touch them, of course. I find that entire experience relaxing and freeing, and I think that makes its way into a lot of my poems.

Whenever I am compelled to start writing, my immediate reaction is to write about family. There is a lot of pain, as well as joy, that derives from my family, whether it is my close family, or distant. Besides the hardships, the importance of family is something that my parents reinforced throughout my childhood and into my young adult life. Some were silent lessons of making sure I was always around them when I was young, but others developed as I grew older; through funerals, holidays, new family members through marriage or birth, the message that family will always come first was always just under the surface. Which, I suppose, is why it is my first response.

I also find that nature really gets me in the mood to write. I have a hammock strung between two birch trees in my backyard that I swing in often. I watch the birds hop above me, the leaves rustle in the wind, perch my knees up, and scribble in my notebook for hours. I have always loved nature, another thing that I can credit my parents for. Annually, my parents, brother and I stay for a weekend at a secluded cabin with no electricity, running water, or basically any other civilization around. I am not able to go there seeing as how it is two hours away and boat access only; however, my hammock allows me to conceal myself from my neighbors & the busy traffic and just write.

There are so many other little things as well. I love language, so just conversations with friends and family, or even strangers will spark some inspiration for a story or even just a single line in a poem. I also have a passion for music, so compositions that tend to give me chills really inspire me. I think walking is something a lot of people gather inspiration from, myself included, not only because it might be a brand new place that you’re visiting, but also just the little things that you might notice on a daily walk to class on campus. Something I do not do enough is write down single phrases, or even just a few words, as I get the inspiration at that moment, a skill I look forward to building upon throughout this semester.

For many years, my father would look at my creative process and gasp at how chaotic it becomes. Most of my notebooks are organized like that one movie scene from A Beautiful Mind starring Hollywood’s most underappreciated actors in Russell Crowe. I am mainly a fiction writer, and unfortunately when I am struck with inspiration it’s often dispersed in a myriad of notebooks. I have roughly 15 different mini-composition books, all filled cover to cover with characters, scenes, ideas, sketches, jokes, etc. He likes to say he “sees the madness in my method.”

The biggest reason for my massive collection of notebook is that when I do have the inkling to write I’m usually outdoors, walking through whichever park I feel like exploring that day. I find nature to be my biggest inspiration, which is weird considering that I despised being away from my television set as a child. I have a deep fascination of discovering and exploring places I’ve never been. Usually those untouched by the claws of civilization. When I’m exploring a park, I like to imagine how the place came to be, how it looked at the beginning of the millennia. I like to wonder who walked those paths before me, which animals may have passed or flown by. When I’m surrounded by trees I feel most natural, as if I am able to tap into my creative juices unhindered. Secluded areas often find their way into my stories. Last semester, for example I wrote a story where one scene takes place similar to that of Geneseo’s arboretum. The creek acted in my story as an allegory for life moving on after death.