Reflection: Poems of 2006

2006 was the year when I finally decided that I want to pursue the craft of poetry.

The poems I have posted previously were all works from the first poetry workshop I took in college, under the guidance of Ms. Rita Gabis.

It's quite funny to look back at all these poems, to see the "fear" on the page that has now become so apparent me. There is a lot of reluctance in these poems, a lot of distance between the words, the speaker, and the poet. I remember the transitional phase that I was going through while writing these poems, it was my masked persona phase as I would call it. I was trying to tell stories, to illuminate matters and subjects through a masked speaker. It wasn't so much where I was refraining from becoming too personal in my writing, but in all the poems there is a sense of reservation coming from the speaker.

Take the poem "Chase" for example:

The speaker imagines the relationship between the subjects of "Lightning" and "Thunder", but the intents of the speaker is not quite clear. There is obvious sympathy present in the words of the poem, but it's unclear why exactly he/she cares and ponders about this situation. The poem is mainly observant and lacking perspective, which I think creates an interesting reading of the situation. It's almost like an intentional sensory deficit.

I think the poem also reflects a lot of on the transitional phase that I mentioned before concerning this time period. Take a look at the previous draft of this poem:

Chase

I hope for once,
Thunder can catch up
To the swift lightning.

For I lament thunder’s curse
Of his eternal step behind
His careless lover.

And every time
I, too, cry

Along to thunder’s downpour
When he misses her footsteps.

Notice how the "I" has disappeared from the earlier draft of the poem. It's almost as if there was a certain difficulty in admitting to the personal in this poem, and the focus has changed from the speaker's pathos to the subjects emotions.

In (what I'd like to think was) my break-out poem of 2006, "Persona", you can see the start of the moving-away from the impersonal speaker, but the feeling still lingered.

There was clearly a lot of displacement in this poem, through the evocation of Homer's epics, and mainly through the secondary subject of the father. The idea of the mask is a literal concern in this poem, we have the uncertainty of the speaker and the gestures of the father, both serving as a kind of metaphor to describe the desire of both parties wanting to shield themselves from the impending awkwardness.

Now let's look at the first draft:

Persona

You insisted
On a bedtime story,
It is not my habit-
But I shrugged when.

You took out Homer,
(Thanks mom)
From the bookshelf

As you read
About Odysseus’ reunion with Telemachus
You smiled
So hard, you almost cracked the cement
Of your face,

And you cried
For Priam’s plea,
But your tears were bland,
They were not salty like mine.

I soon fell asleep
To your bad acting.

Again, there is the transition from the direct address to an indirect address. In the earlier draft it's apparent that the speaker is more blatantly concerned about his own well-being and opinions, but after revisions the father gets a lot more attention. I think while working on this I became more aware of of the "other person", but also became more scared of this "other person" and so this displacement occurred. To say things through the other person's actions, and to harvest the discomfort that comes with the surrogate voice...

(Oi, I'm getting sleepy writing this, probably not a good thing, haha.)

One of the things that Ms. Rita Gabis said to me about this set of poems was that "The fact that these poems are "in process" does not distract from their power and promise", I think I can agree with that now that I have reflected upon them. I have always found it embarrassing to look at old writing of mine, but I think the discoveries I made today taught me that it can be worthwhile. I think though these poems may be a bit unpolished, the awkwardness and the reluctance of my then-voice ultimately gives it a bit of a hindsight beauty.

Thank you for reading!