I’ve been thinking about my own poetry a lot recently thanks to this class, and I feel a bit disillusioned. From a young age, I’ve been told I’m good at poetry (this poem I wrote in first or second grade that I don’t really remember being frequently cited by my parents as proof), but I’m not sure how true that is. In fourth grade, I was told my writing (it was prose) was very “poetic.” I like to think that’s true sometimes, but even accepting that statement as true, does that I’m good at writing poetry? I’m a huge fan of metaphors, so I probably throw those around in a lot of my work, but besides that, I’m not sure if there is any poetic artistry involved in my actual poetry. Line breaks? Effectively my poetry’s comma. Rhyming? Just no (although I think the great realization that poetry does not have to rhyme was a huge step forward). Meter? What’s that? That was a joke. I promise I know what it is. Writing with it in mind is another story though. I suppose I am unsatisfied with my current poetry. I think some lines come out nice, but its far from masterful.
Even more bothersome is the incapability I feel about writing happy poems or really any feeling that isn’t pain or unease. I feel like I lack the words to describe feelings that aren’t hopeless. I jokingly refer to myself as the unpleasant poet. Just yesterday, I joked to my sister that my latest workshop poem would cement me as the kid who just writes unsettling stuff. But I don’t really want to be that person. By all means, successfully unsettling the reader does make me, dare I say, proud, but I don’t want it to be my only talent (assuming it is a talent I possess in the first place).
Ultimately, I don’t want this to be a pathetic praise/pity grab, but a reflection to lead to improvement. I was thinking that I should challenge myself to write poems I don’t usually write for the rest of the workshops. This is the best setting to learn after all.
Right now, my goals consist of 1 happy poem (that’s pretty vague, isn’t it?) and 1 narrative poem. The last narrative poem I wrote was written in 6th grade and probably overflowing with more cheese than an overstuffed quesadilla (although I still look back on it fondly). I’ve also been thinking about epic poems recently (like the Odyssey), but that might be just a bit too much. Just a bit. I still need a few more ideas to fill out this semester, but I think this is a good start.
I find a lot of solace in the sounds that come out of my headphones. Coming back to Geneseo has been something I long awaited during the summer, and the moment I arrive back, things start to go downhill. Not due to any forces that I can control, things just happen sometimes. And when those things happen, music is something that always soothes the mind, induces tears, and brings me the strength to show up to class.
Music is, in a sense, poetry. Especially to some artists who really work to create lyrics that mean something. For example, lets take a look at Elliott Smith.
Smith was a deeply troubled individual, and of course his lyrics reflect that. Songs like “Between The Bars” that discuss heavy alcoholism, “Say Yes” with regret upon past relationships, and even the poppy “Baby Britain” carries heavy, dark overtones. Some lines can be blatant, outright, such as “situations get f*cked up, but turn around sooner or later” from “Say Yes”, but there are some lines that hit harder, and are very poetic. Like this verse from his song “Rose Parade”
“Tripped over a dog in a choke-chain collar, people were shouting and pushing and saying they’d “traded a smoke for a food stamp dollar” as a ridiculous marching band started playing”
While it paints an incredibly intense picture, it also shows an underlying confusion of the speaker, and the hilarity that is occurring around the speaker as they try to make sense of everything. While it’s not the most happy lyric, it does a lot of work in terms of setting a scene, characterized the speaker, and creating an event that can carry on through the rest of the song.
I find Smith to be incredible not just because of his instrumentalism, but I am always impressed by the complexity of his lyrics. He studied philosophy and political science at Hampshire College, which perhaps help to explain just how he is able to take grand ideas and put them into lyrical form that not only tells a story, but makes a point. His troubled beginnings also add to this, as Smith was abused as a child and was an addict for most of his adult life. He suffered depression and committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest (although this fact as been disputed with an argument towards him being murdered by his girlfriend at the time). These factors come together to help him create songs that hit hard, especially for one such as myself who has suffered from depression for most of my young life, thankfully not so much anymore. But even if you’ve never experienced depression, you can still connect to his music; thats how talented Smith is.
While there are many other artists who show this type of lyrical genius (KT Tunstall, David Bowie, Kendrick Lamar, Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys off of the top of my head), Smith serves as a great example for the combination of poetic verse and music, as any one of his songs can be separated from the musical component and stand on their own as great pieces of poetry. It is an interesting exercise for poets to work with.
I am trying harder to find time to write for fun but it’s so hard. Whenever I have the time to write, it feels like all motivation is lost. I get stage fright when the pen is in my hand and can’t find words that deserve to be on the page. I am trying to practice writing despite a lack of motivation because then maybe I’ll have more practice with how I like to format my writing and maybe find more inspiration from my attempts at writing. Learning how to push past my what I feel like I am lacking and my need for perfection on the first try feels impossible but I am getting there.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was in middle school which is why I am English Creative Writing major. I have loved writing poetry to express whatever I am feeling in the moment. Writing is a big part of my life and I hope to one day write a poetry book. I am still trying to perfect my skills as a writer and learn to share my work more but it is difficult. I’m not entirely sure how to start that process because becoming inspired doesn’t happen often enough. I am interested in learning how to publish a book and how to get my thoughts together to create a theme for a poetry book.
My vision of poetry has changed drastically throughout the years. As a young girl, I wrote blocks of texts full of description. They were hybrids of prose poems and fiction pieces. I scrawled my words on every inch of printer paper I could find. With a staple in the top-left corner, I proudly shared my pieces with my family. My mom and Dad pretended my work was marvelous, but my older sister said I used too much description. Too many words. She told me to get to the point.
From then on, I kept my poems short. Lines couldn’t stray too far from the center of the page. My stanzas were tall and thin. My words were minimal.
Up until the end of high school, I believed that good poetry must not only be short, but it also must rhyme and its stanzas must mirror one another. I relied heavily on rhyme generators to tie all my lines together. It wasn’t until I attended a writer’s retreat at Adelphi University that I realized sophisticated poetry doesn’t require rhyme.
Earlier in my college career, I wrote poetry with little to no rhymes. Internal rhymes were risky, and I was afraid my poetry would come off as corny if I utilized them. Yet again, I limited my writing based on rules that did not exist.
Upon taking an ekphrasis class, I discovered the beauty of slam poetry. Poets spoke with passion; they shouted, they whispered, they cried, they flailed their arms around. Sometimes, music accompanied their poetry. Their poems were riddled with long and short lines as well as rhyming. There wasn’t necessarily a pattern of any sort in their poetry. And yet, their words were just as powerful.
As I enter the latter half of my college career and I take this poetry workshop, I continue to learn that poetry has no limits. There are no rules to this craft. Only the poet can decide what works best for their work. Accepting this as fact is quite liberating.
I think I’ve been taken by the idea that a “translation” can be thought of as a movement of some idea to another location. I find the blend of conceptual and physical metaphor really appealing; an idea is not only an object than can be moved through space, but almost must be moved through (probably strenuous) effort. Maybe I’m the only one, but the image of a little mailman hunched over using every bit of their strength to carry a big, bulky crate sticks in my mind. When I think about it a little harder, though, I find translation is just a way of looking at language I’ve never thought of before. That’s exciting to me. Language sometimes gets stuck in either transactional or utilitarian ruts and my perception gets stuck with it, which isn’t necessarily wrong but it leaves out the immensity of language that underpins a translational view.
So many human interactions do rely on the little mailman being able to deliver some vague desires, ideas, thoughts to other peoples head. To think we’ve gotten to the point of being able to create complex poetry is astonishing to me. To think we’ve overcome the language and cultural barriers in that poetry, prose, whatever is even more astonishing. And to think we can deliver big ol’ idea packages with simple passing glances and other non-verbal cues, even though most basic, knocks me out of my chair. The fact that real, weighty concepts can jump through space, time, and people seemingly with such ease boggles my mind. I can only wish I could write poetry with the brevity and meaning of a smile.
Maybe this is all to say that it may be best to see language and all its translation as existing on more of a landscape than how we usually see it on a flat piece of paper. Poetry can then be viewed as a path (maybe the quickest, maybe the most scenic) to get a idea or emotion from point A to point B, from one human to another. And, like any other map, poetry will always fall a little short of actually standing in those mental woods and walking, but all we can do is try to create the best map so that others may be able to walk some similar path for themselves.
For me, this past summer was filled with margaritas and disposable days. I felt greedy, hoarding these hours with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It’s nice to be back to a more scheduled life, to return to a classroom setting where I’m pushing myself to create poems rather than waiting for them to come to me.
When I’m writing organically, my poem ideas usually start as one-word concepts: glacial, locusts, larvae. So in class, it was an easy transition for me to shift from attempting to capture the image words invoke into defining what they mean to me. I had forgotten how nice it was to be surrounded by writers, a community of people looking to write and explore poetry and translation together.
I’m excited to see where this next semester takes me and my writing! I’ve always viewed poetry as my way of continually interacting with the mutable world around me, so the constantly changing nature of translation really intrigues me. The truest and most beautiful thing that pushes me into creating is the way that nothing lasts. Everything changes and passes. The creative process is just that. Not a means to an end, but a way to engage with being alive. I hope to improve my skills and continue to learn techniques that will bring my writing to a more advanced level.
Much of my writing is based around an intrusive thought. There are always moments in my day where I see something that will remind me of someone or something that I want to push far back into my consciousness; something that I desperately do not want to remember. It could be brown and curly hair, a song on the radio, the smell of a burning cigarette; anything can send a grenade into the psyche that explodes into an intense memory that I have tried my best to erase. These little invasions lead to some great poetry, as, at least for me, it’s easier to write about trauma and the things in life that are less than happy than things that make my heart sing. Yes, some of these memories are positive, like the sounds that my ex-boyfriend made while he slept beside me, but they are always tinged with some form of sadness, or perhaps regret. They are no longer, they are but moments in the past that come back to haunt the present. Even if I am in a better state of mind when I was when the memory took place, part of me is always sentimental about the past, always wishing to go back. But, as I am here, in Geneseo, the only place to go is forward, into the future.
The invasion of thoughts stands as a foundation to a work. My process most often starts with a thought popping into my head, most of the time completely out of the blue. I have found myself on line at the grocery store, at a bank, driving a car, when out of nowhere I will need to stop whatever I am doing to write down an idea before it slips away, never to return. These thoughts are fleeting, however they are strong in nature, and require immediate attention, and then more and more attention until I feel satisfied enough to post them to a blog or put them in my google drive folder of poetry, to forget about it until I find it at a later date, and have to start revising again.
Basing poetry off of a memory has always been an interesting idea to me. Not only are you able to vividly describe a scene, but there is room to put the conclusions of the event, as well as the implications of what has occurred, and how it will effect the speaker. The speaker of each piece is given the opportunity to not only share something that has occurred, but to give it meaning beyond what is actually being said.
Invasions of the mind are inescapable. It is not only difficult to truly push these memories out, but it appears to be impossible as humans don’t even know the entire capabilities of our own brains. So, if you ask me, the best thing to do with these thoughts is to write them down, and see if they provide any clarity to the present day that could be useful in everyday life. Embrace the little invaders, and remember that no matter how unpleasant the memory, it is still your life, and is, in the end, under your own control, and no one else’s.
“to isolate is to lock / the mind inside of itself”
I chose isolate because it was how I had felt all summer. I hadn’t written much over the past three months, but ever since unloading my belongings into my dorm a few days ago, writing is all I’ve been doing. Normally when things get hard for me, writing is my saving grace and the thing I pour it all into. But somehow this summer’s challenges just shut the switch off.
So to sit in a room of other poets, talking about words and associations and accidentally oversharing about what this summer had been for me — it was refreshing, to say the least. This definition of a simple word was enough to remind me what it was about writing that always kept me coming back. There were other people in the room that got it.
And no matter how lonely of an activity writing can be, when you sit down with a group of strangers that get it right away it reminds you of the magic behind what it is that we’re doing. The idea of translation, to me, reminds me that the job of a poet or writer in this world is to throw pride and privacy away and share every gritty detail of your truth to convey a universal idea or feeling and make other people feel less isolated in their experiences, their struggles and their joys.
And so my semester goal is “Tell the truth. All of it.” To play with new styles and new tools, yes. To push myself to try new things and get out of my old habits, yes. But mostly, just to tell the truth. My truth. In the hopes that it could someday help someone accept theirs and feel a little bit less alone.
