Reflections: Early 2007

These set of poems I entitled “Linger” were worked on in the beginning half of 2007 under the guidance of the poet Donna Masini.

While the poems of 2006 dealt a lot with the feelings of “distance” and “fear”, I feel like in these poems I began to face many of my own taboos. What I mean by that is I started writing more into the subject of the “self”, regardless of whether it’s myself or the “self” of others.

Donna Masini also played a big part in inducing this poetic change for me. Masini is a bit less of an “image poet” as Gabis (in my opinion), in her poetry I think she tends to focus a lot more on the energies of physical interaction. “Words are physical,” she said to me once, and that poetry is something that she reads with her heart. I think during that time I interpreted her styles as working with a kind of muscle memory, to convey emotions through bodily reactions to matters.

Let’s look at “Your Carousel”.

This poem was interesting for me to write because it’s on a subject that I have thought and written about for a bit of time. I was addressing a friend of mine who passed away in high school, while remembering my fascination with the gothic and macabre. A lot of the images I used here are very meta-physical, and by that I mean they were created from memory but of association. This probably sounds a little weird, but in a way it can be seen as embellishments to my memories, but to me I feel like I wrote from an interpretation of the physical feelings I have felt for the situation.

When I look at the images I am sometimes still a bit surprised at the things that I wrote. Things like:

“the black lace parasol you used to hold in the rain for an excuse to drown.”

or

“children running into your unlit carousel”

and even

“silence only for the occasional tears rolling down powdered faces”.

I think I was mostly inspired by my friend’s character, and kind of her perspective and her approach to sickness and ultimately death. The syneaesthesia I created in the poem was almost like my answer to her suffering and her passing, the beauty that I believed was involved in her pain.

The process of writing this poem was very different from what I had been doing previously. I think I allowed myself to be more aware of the part of me that was still grieving, letting my subconscious speak in metaphors. It was almost like I was establishing a “self” out of that side of me, a persona if you will.

I never really noticed how this “period” of my poetry explored the different facets of me. Another piece that I found to be very important during this time was “Exhibition: Self-portrait on Canvas”.

I’m not sure what went through my head while I was writing this, but it probably had something to do with that Plath that I was reading. (Typical, I know) Masini was big on Plath, and the one thing that she always talked about was her ability to perform on the page. I was actually getting into the idea of performance art during that time, which may have contributed to this poem as well. But I digress…

This is not a poem that I am very proud of; I wouldn’t say it’s a finished piece by any means, but I do enjoy the roughness it brings. The poem explicitly explores a bodily relationship, an empathic connection between the speaker and the subject. The speaker is deeply affected by the physicality of the subject, and he/she is eager to understand the causality of the subject’s actions.

There are lines that suggest a strange kind of intimacy between the two:

“Screaming helps him concentrate” “…trembles at the sight of blood”

But also lines that suggest distance, criticism, and unfamiliarity:

“Thick red syllables\That clog too quickly” “Skin rips, his stroke angry and\Too verbose for the canvas”

The speaker narrates the every action of the “painter”, and the poem ultimately gets lost in a whirlpool of the speaker’s obsession and the subject’s passions.

I find the discourse in this poem quite intriguing because it is an attempt to understand a “self” by indirectly addressing it on the page. It is almost as if the speaker is attempting to crack the subject even though there is no direct interaction between the two, and it’s more than just an address, there is the desire to redact.

. . .

I also started writing tiny poems like “Before” around this time. They are almost like imagery exercises, and they’re great for learning to compress language, I think. And again, this poem is clearly very egocentric, and contains a lot of physical eros (as Masini would say).

I think overall there’s a feeling of daring desperation in this set of poems, especially compared to the work of the previous year. Even Masini had told me to “relax” in her comments, and I think she had seen the impatience that I wrote with throughout this course. It’s as if I have been imprisoning many voices inside of me—capturing moments, images, voices, as I have in the past and then I finally decided to let it all out to speak for themselves.