Thursday, February 05, 2009

On Poetry (2005)

This is a piece of "found writing," something that I wrote three years ago and found on a random hard drive tonight. It reads like a blog post, so I thought I'd share it here.

Scarily, it's as true as the night I wrote it.

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As I sit here, on the night before this essay is due, I cannot help but laugh at how whatever muse sings for me is a drama queen. She whispers for days, blowing kisses behind my back, until I finally break into her dressing room and shake a program in front of her face and scream, “Why haven’t we rehearsed?” If my writing process were a dance, it would be a tango. The music is intense – thumping, powerful, each motion feeling more important than maybe it should. At least this is how it is with papers and such for school. My muse sings only in the late hours, when everyone else is asleep. I cannot tell whether she is shy or whether hers is a voice that perhaps can only be heard at night, rolling from beyond distant mountains where I sit at the foot of grey skyscrapers and try to write down what I hear.

Writing poetry is very different. For me a good poem is like a good watch: inside bubbles all this tension, this precision motion, hundreds of individual parts, but on the surface the motion is simple and beautiful, two little hands traveling around and around, capturing the essence of infinity. A bad poem for me is ponderous, is self-indulgent, and at all times do I try to avoid being overtaken by myself. It would be like William Wallace wielding a pistol; the images have to harmonize, have to move together.

The net effect of this striving for simplicity is that my poetry always feels very small to me. I’m self-conscious in class when others read their poems because I always feel like they’ve aimed higher and achieved more. My hands are so unpracticed, my tongue so undisciplined. Sometimes I feel like I’m writing with cotton in my mouth. The words that flow so freely when their audience is a passing breeze get lodged in my fingernails when trying to write a poem. Sometimes it’s easier than others. The shortest poems are the easiest to start and the hardest to finish. My fear is that I get to the end and all I’m left with is little strands of an idea that wasn’t meant for me.

One of the biggest challenges is inspiration. For this I usually turn to nature, because in nature I see a reflection of myself. I like to think of myself as gentle, but those parts of me have natural predators. Fear plays a part in all my poems, I think: fear of being alone, of being stranded and forgotten. I guess of being misunderstood, too, which seems like a silly fear of a child afraid of something he does not possess the words to describe. That is one irony of getting older: as your vocabulary increases, you understand more and more how to talk about your problems and less and less of how to deal with them. Oh, for the days when all our fears lived in the closet or under the bed… I graduated high school and all of a sudden the world became my closet.

See, self-indulgence. It’s difficult not to over-analyze when you’re writing about yourself. This is what I try to cut through when I write a poem, this huge presence of ‘self.’ We had our poetry reading the other night, and all I could think about were my poems and how they would be received. I couldn’t see past myself, couldn’t appreciate others except in relation to me. I hope my poems show a yearning to reach past that. The greatest fear of the conceited man is that no one cares if he only loves himself. I want my writing to break me free of that, but my tools are dull and simple, little stone hammers and bone-chisels. I think that’s why I turn to nature imagery a lot. There is something very unselfish about trees that grow whether or not anyone’s looking, or leaves that fall with no one to rake them once they get to the bottom. I see something beautiful in that.

When I started this semester, I was afraid. Afraid that when I squeezed myself no poetry would come out. You can see in my first poems that I was unable to put myself inside them. They were linguistic exercises, little games that played with myself, like a cat with a ball of yarn that he likes to pretend is really the mouse he’s hungering for. The illusion worked fine until it came time for my work to be workshopped, and once it became a matter of reputation, a matter of pride, I forced myself to squeeze harder. The resulting poem was better. At least it had some of me inside of it. It was a poem about falling leaves, and about love. I never understood why so much of our art is about love until I tried to make some myself. Art, that is. I found poetry to be really well suited to the kinds of emotions I was feeling, this incredible tension between what we expect in love and what we get, between happiness and the fact that she doesn’t like my parents.

Maybe this is why I think a good poem has real tension. It’s because all things are in relation to one another, strung up in a web and clinging to one another, relying on one another. Maybe love is one of the most potent emanations of that primordial tension. Re-reading my poems, I realize they are all about love. I’m not really sure of who, or for who. My girlfriend would kill me if I told her they were all about her, and I would be lying if I did. They are bigger than one person. I want something out of love that I don’t think it can give me; a sense of place, of purpose, of peace. What I like about writing this essay is that I can use words like that and not worry that they’ve been used before.

I try not to let my poems have that luxury, but one of the hardest things about poetry is how do you know when you’ve succeeded? Is it the admiration of others that validates the work? Has it blossomed once it speaks to a part of me? I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded this semester in creating anything beautiful. I would like to think so, I guess. It is the tiny disruptions that end up the story of a living thing. Maybe that’s what my writing is yearning for… the story of myself. One of the poems that I thought of but never wrote started, “I want to believe that my footsteps are displacing the earth,” and I do. I think we all do. What an interesting desire for a mortal being – to stretch beyond our time here, our hands outstretched and reaching for more.