Reflections: Latter 2007

This set of poems entitled “Deconstruct” contains the poetry encounters I made under the guidance of contemporary poet Jan Heller Levi.

This writing period was one of my most revision-intensive experiences in poetry. The sense of “self” from my previous set of poems is still heavily present in these poems, but here we have a “self” that is beginning to open up and reaching out to other bodies. It is yet another transitional phase; the body goes from internal, private dialogues with the multiple personae of “self” to learning to communicate as a whole with outside influences… Extensions, and learning to feel, understand, and finally come to terms with the existence and barriers of other consciousness outside the ego…

Jan Levi was unique, but relevant to my previous poetry mentors. Her images and her metaphors are living, breathing proof of existence—they are in the “present tense”. She has a tendency to immediate reactions, to approach subjects/matter head-on. I think from that I have started to explore my own encounters, and to yield power from moments of awkwardness.

“His Pillow” was a favorite of mine within this set of poems. The revision process of this poem showed a lot of “deconstruction” of layers and contradictions, as shown in this previous draft of the poem:

(Draft 4)

We are not stigmas under the sun
Only when our breaths are covered by
Midnight shadows and
Cricket cries;

Your grey sheets are not enough.

Like tattoo-regrets on
The shivering body I denied you,
I want to be unwritten
With inkless pores,
Ones that will not spill even when embarrassed,
Frightened

I am,

Because you only get annoyed by my laughter-
Joyless and thickly accented
With the echoes of you on my tongue.

I wonder if you knew
Your hazel eyes
Asked whether I care to be
(Unloved),

Just seconds ago.

The language in this previous draft was definitely less concrete, and the images are a lot more metaphorical. There is a lot of “covering-up” in this draft, as hinted by words like “tattoo-regrets” and “unloved”. There was clearly not enough here to propose the feelings of jealousy, reasons for insecurity, and the “alternate” who’s been plainly outlined in the final draft of this poem.

A lot of thoughts needed to be revised to push out the underlining meanings. The speaker here was just a bit too self-involved and he failed to reveal the persuasions of the outside forces and other consciousness.

Now look at the changes in the final draft.

Notice these lines and their enjambments:

“You want me only\on your side of the bed;”

“Your grey sheets are not dark enough\for my scent?”

I was trying to work with the awkwardness of the situation—allowing the reader to pause for a moment and imagine the reaction, the face of the person being addressed.

The idea of “his pillow” also became more important, and further explored. It brings up the presence of “another” throughout this poem, a third person perhaps.

He is not physically present, but we know he exists, and he exists for the sake of the poem. It’s the idea of the body, an impenetrable body that we can’t fully understand but need for the feelings to work. Structurally, the appearance of this “third” becomes the poem’s turning point in terms of focus. If you noticed the pronoun usage, it is clear that the beginning of the poem is more concerned with the “you”, whereas the latter is more concerned with the “I”. But “his pillow” also acts as a thematic turning point, setting the point of climax for the poem.

This process of finding meaning through revision became an important part of my craft in poetry. It’s almost as though I was sifting my words through revision and finding things that I’m most concerned about.

Let’s look at the revision process in “Father”:

I was actually quite shock at the direction this poem took through the revision process. Perhaps the subject matter was had always existed subconsciously, but its appearance definitely came as a surprised.

One can see the difference in this very first draft:

Testicles are hard
to draw;

You need to be open minded,
See pass the obstructing penis

And imagine
The smooth white surface resting shyly
Against the scrotal sac.

Your hands trying to form the delicate shapes,
You want to touch them,
feel them slip
Into shadows, curves,

Your fingers dig
Deep into the tubule mass,
The complexity that frustrates
The pencil, you no longer care for.

Only the velveteen encircling,
The union,
A blossom.

The origin of this poem actually came about while I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art working on drawing studies of various body parts of Greek statues. I remember I was struggling with getting the appropriate texture—the discrepancy of flesh to stone. I was conflicted between representing the sculptural forms as cold, hard, and lifeless objects, or to allow them to pulse and breathe on my page. This conflict is evident in many parts of in this first draft. The speaker begins by establishing his struggle, and proceeds to describe very factually what he comprehends visually on the surface. Something happens after the third stanza however, a barrier is breached and the speaker is no longer just observing, but “touching” or at least thinking about touching the figure. The subject of the poem is thus created. This “touch” has breathed life into the inanimate object of the poem and thus creating a new focal point for the reader as well as for poet.

Let’s look at a later draft:

(Draft 6)

I cannot draw your testicles.

Even in my hands
you harden and pull away;

I just wanted to feel what I never understood-

Why you never held me as closely,
as unconditionally
as your enveloping scrotum against my cold fingers.

I want to see beyond the brown skin,
the black hairs,
to break the pale white shells
and spill the reason why
I exist.

But it’s your silent indifference
that never allows me
to look, to ask,
to dig any deeper.

Notice that in this version the “object” has already been given a persona.

Notice the images:

“…you never held me as closely,\as unconditionally\as your enveloping scrotum against my cold fingers.”

“…the brown skin, the black hairs…”

The speaker is no longer looking at just a lifeless figure, but exploring it (or him) underneath. The speaker is searching for a soul to speak with almost. It took a few more revisions and some conversations with myself on the page, but eventually it just occurred to me that the speaker should be addressing his father. And I say “should” because it was a conscious choice, and I believe this poetic authority was definitely something I discovered during this revision period. It is that ethos that upgrades a person who writes in his journal into a writer, and that ethos that transforms scraps of free-writing into poetry.

It is as stated in “I keep a vase of dried roses”, it’s what and how the poet has decided to make the speaker do which makes his actions poetry-worthy.

Thanks again for reading!

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.

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!