Letters to a Past Me (High School Poet)

***In the same vein as my “Fuck Yeah” series (which I will try to do another post of in a couple weeks), I’m starting a new and hopefully more unique series of posts, titled “Letters to a Past Me.” Title pretty much says it all: in these posts, I will be writing letters to the sort of person I was 5, 10, 15 years ago. Oh, trust me, it will be embarrassing, and I will probably regret these posts the moment I hit that “Publish” button here on WordPress, but it’ll all be worth it if you fine folks at least enjoy them. So, without any further interruptions…
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Dear Me (High School Poet),

I shouldn’t discourage you. After all, every writer has to start somewhere, and you never imagined that you were going to be a poet by profession. Some of these poems have a nice sense of rhythm even. But why all the melodrama? Let’s just take a little stanza:

The skies now darken on all of my sight,
The beginning of what shall be my final end,
And though I’ve strived to spread only happiness and light
The fatigue in me has torn my soul too far to mend.

Of course I’m speaking from hindsight, but even at the time, God, all you do is whine whine whine. Everything is dark, everything is despair. What’s really amazing is how you manage to write about darkness and agony and angst when you live an average life in the suburbs. Seriously, where is all this pain coming from?

Oh, wait. Oh my God, you’re aware of all this:

My dear heart,
What causes your ache?
You’ve felt no blow
And have yet to break,
And, still, the barriers of sanity quake…
For darkness is my only foe,
For whom I’ve no amends to make…

Oh wow, really? “The barriers of sanity quake”? Even when you realize how silly you’re being, you’re still being silly. I think it’s a gift of the high school teenager actually. You actually create something from nothing – or rather, maybe it’s just angst created from hormones run wild. Either way, it’s impressive, it takes skill to be this unhappy for no reason.

Ah, but you were lovesick too! And no lovesick poetry-writing teenage boy is complete without an ample cache of love poems. For instance:

And your voice, how it sings
From your throne in the sky,
Capturing mortal hearts
And lifting us high.

No one can ever say I didn’t put women on a pedestal. That’s from a Valentine’s Day poem. I’ll admit, it’s sweet, as are most of those poems. Here’s another bit:

Love knows not one
More faithful than I
For, sooner will I die
Than call our love done
Just fall in my arms
And share with me bliss
In the sweet innocence
Of an eternal kiss.

“Eternal kiss”? In retrospect, that sounds so creepy. Funny thing is, I don’t even remember who, if anyone, inspired me to write this poem – so much for that “faithfulness.”

Looking back on all these poems, I gotta admit – they’re a special kind of terrible, literally. They’re undoubtedly bad, as all high school poetry has to be. “Love” and “above” should never be rhymed together that often, everything is either the most beautiful thing ever or the darkest thing ever (I’m beginning to wonder if being a teenager is its own form of manic-depression), and they always last forever. Always. But, like I said, you had to start somewhere, and one of the golden rules of all artistic professions is that you start terribly.

So it’s okay, past me. I forgive you. Hey, at least these poems meant something to you back then. Hell, they still do in a way. I can’t read them without feeling a bit of nostalgia, even if it is over angst and hopeless lovesickness. And maybe you had to write these for me, so I could look back and really see how much more there is to life than feeling tired and lonely and wanting to be loved. There’s blogging about how you used to feel tired and lonely and wanted to be loved.

And now, to close, one last golden stanza of yours:

Bind me to your heart my dear.
In pain, I wish to feel you near
In dark, abolish all my fear
At world’s end, let us find a pier
And we’ll sail off towards galaxies
That we have never been before.
Would you be my everything
So we could be something more…

Sincerely,
Me

Poetry and Prose

To start, I’ll apologize for my blogposts recently; though I created this blog as a way of writing out my rambling thoughts, I’ve been particularly scatter-brained lately, and fear that everything I’ve been writing is a bit incoherent.  Hopefully this one will go a bit better?

I sometimes wonder if there’s a difference between poetry and prose at all anymore.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s why I’ve begun to grow vaguely interested in screenwriting, a wholly different format from the two.  At this point, the closest to a clear distinction would probably be both rhythm/meter and physical form.  But even these have become somewhat obsolete.  As it is, it’s probably best if one simply “trusts” an author’s self-claimed distinction: “Well, he called this a poem, so I guess it’s a poem.”

Whitman’s partially to blame, spreading free verse so rapidly as an influence.  If anything, I’m sure it was a huge relief to poets everywhere.  I enjoy some classic poetry, mostly the Romantics, like Keats, Coleridge, and a bit of Wordsworth and Shelley, but also Pope.  I’d mention Milton, but he was only a step away from Whitman really, keeping only the meter with the famous Paradise Lost.  But I can’t read poems like those for inspiration concerning my own style.  My Puerto Rican roommate wants to try writing poetry in English, and he’s more of a lover of those classic poets than I am.  But my sensibilities are strictly towards a lack of rhyming and a rhythm – not to say I shun rhythm, but lean more towards accentual rhythm if anything.  I gave my hand at rhyming and syllables in high school, and I can do away with it.

If anything, this frees poetry up to be more poetic, or poetic on a different sensibility, and this is where the “physical form” that I mentioned earlier comes in.  By that, I mean simply how the poem looks on a page, where the lines are broken and how.  I call this “physical” because it’s something that usually can’t be expressed in the reading of the poem – line breaks are often enjambments of sentences, cutting them for the effect of a word or image, and, in my opinion anyway, shouldn’t be read as punctuation marks.  They couldn’t be anyways, and one could look at a complex e.e. cummings poem to know why: you’d be pausing every 3 words, and no one would know what those breaks mean until they physically saw at the poem.  It allows for such an inventive line of creativity, one that’s literally inexhaustible.  I’d even go so far as to say that a poem could be relined – that is, given line breaks in different places – and have a slightly altered meaning.

But with freedoms like these always come the absolute deviation, and thus we come to prose poetry.  I’ve seen numerous examples of prose poetry, some appearing like more coherent versions of Finnegan’s Wake, others seeming quite like regular prose.  In one of his volumes of short stories, Jorge Luis Borges refers to his works as “verses,” refusing to create a distinction between prose and poetry.

For me, the separation is usually a matter of concentration: my poems will tend to be a single thought or image, while my stories take on narrative complexities.  But of course there are poems that tell stories, even modern poems like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, not to mention the longer works of Browning, Wordsworth, and Tennyson.  And there are short stories that tell the complexity of a single moment as well as any poem.  You might be confused when reading a Virginia Woolf novel, confused that it’s not actually a poem by T.S. Eliot, with its disparate scenes that seemlessly blend into one another, or harshly for that matter.  The other night, I was working on a short story I’m writing, and the form of a particular sentence caught my attention.  I realized, in the span of a single and rather short sentence, I could show a spectrum between 2 characters, starting the sentence with one personality and ending it on the next.  This is quite a small thing, but if one so wished, one could give prose the formal complexity of a poem, each sentence its own significance.  The reason most of us prose writers don’t is because we’d drive ourselves crazy during the editing process, wondering if there was any other way to arrange the description of a window that exemplified the effect of looking out a window. I’d never finish a story, and I write them slow enough as it is!

This ramble isn’t meant to have a real conclusion, only to offer my thoughts on the subject – there is no real conclusion, so long as genres are what they are: messy, vague, and made to be broken.  But, as past posts have shown, I’m obsessed with form, and I think it’d be quite an interesting thing to come at one medium and wonder how the sensibilities of the other could be applied.  Not only does this offer new possibilities for each medium, but it makes one more highly aware of the differences between the two forms, and the qualities of each one.  One might not think anything of line breaks until wondering how they could be used in prose, and then they seem to have a huge power in poetry as well.  And the blending won’t stop with poetry and prose either – I wonder if screenplay/comics poems will be written/drawn, or if any books will be written under the sensibility of a screenplay.

In the mean time, poetry and prose are still a mess of distinction.  A bisexual friend described her sexuality to me once, saying that she was always bisexual – she didn’t see why anyone wouldn’t find both sexes attractive.  I’m a bit of the same way with poetry and prose – can one write one and not the other?  I thought I could, thought I could write solely fictional prose, but somehow poetry caught me again.  I know I’m supposing that everyone is a writer like me, constantly wondering into the nature of form and style.  I doubt Stephanie Mayer worries herself over poetry very much.  But I think the second you wonder about form, no matter which one of the two you write, the other becomes inextricable, always somewhat of a problem, yet always a bit of a solution too.

it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!

Okay, I know I’m a day early with this posting (considering the title), but I have a good routine going with posting every Tuesday night and there’s no sense in ruining that rhythm really, so I’ll just keep from my usual shameless self-advertising until tomorrow (Thursday, April 1).

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I’d like to start with a poem:

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having–
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
–it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)

when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving–
but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense
–alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found
and having is giving and giving is living–
but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing
–it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea
(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

–e.e. cummings

This is one of my favorite e.e. cummings poems, precisely because the way it sounds begs you to reenact the life that is bursting in each living.  The meter is perfect, so much so that even when reading it in your head you can feel your tongue flicking with each syllable.  Its rhythm bears the immediacy of action in the second stanza – you can see the speaker with his lover, and as he’s reading the lines he suddenly turns to her and says “it’s(kiss me now).”  Perhaps the line shouldn’t even end – there should be a moment of silence for a kiss, and the rejoicing begins again.

So now I want you to do something.  You don’t have to do this, and I’m sure that you won’t, but I want you to do it.  It’s a very simple task, and you’re more than capable for the job: I want you to read the poem aloud.  Hmm, rather, I want you to free-sing it aloud.  If you don’t know what free-singing is, don’t worry, I believe I just made that up.  I’d say spoken-word-poetry it aloud, but that sounds rather awkward and I don’t want anyone to read it like William Shatner (it’s…kiss me…now…spring!).  So what do I mean by free-singing this poem outloud?  Well, it’s quite similar to reading, only don’t just mouth the words on the page in time to your vocal chords’ humming.  When you say the words aloud, imbue them with something, with the energy of their meanings, with the memories they evoke from you, with the emotions that you associate with them.  Do not go in a monotone, “when faces called flowers float out of the ground.”  Feel the words, feel their rhythm, feel them carry you to the end of the line like a stream or a breeze: “when Faces called Flower float Out of the Ground,” or perhaps, “when faces called Flowers Float out of the ground.”

Feel the musicality in them, and reflect that in the bounds of your tongue off the roof of your mouth, flicking like a fishing rod casting out its line, or feel the air stream between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, or feel your teeth gently press to your lips as you mouth an “f” or a “v.”  Feel the poem as you’re reading it, feel it being read.

And do not be afraid of its energy.  If your hand should begin to sway or bounce, don’t stop it!  Let your foot tap, your head dip and swerve, let even your voice hush and boom as it pleases.  Allow your body to dance with the melody of the words.  Become the living embodiment of the words, feel them wave the ends of your fingertips and electrify the hairs on your skin.  Most importantly, let yourself smile.

I wanted to post this blog for the beginning of Spring because Winter is all about staying inside, growing sheltered and introverted.  Not only that, but I think we tend to do that naturally these days.  It’s hard to get outside and walk or run or sing or dance.  It’s hard to just be happy sometimes.  But if you read this poem aloud, really read it, sing it, dance it, move with it and around and under it and over it, you’ll be reviving the ink, in a sense.  Contrary to popular belief, ink was never meant to sit still, dry, and repose – it was meant to run, to bubble and boil, to curlicue and zig-zag.  It was not meant to be pealed from the page like rotten meat, but to bound from it, shocked into life by a voice, a spirit, a firm & beating heart.

So read this poem aloud.  Read it to a friend, read it to a lover; let your voice run along the mountain paths, your hands carry you through the mind of the body.  Send warm weather through, or even just a warm breath.  Read it to revive the words & the spirit.  Read it because you’re alive, we’re alive, dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!

The Play of Mediums

Reading loads of Virginia Woolf lately, I’m struck, first and foremost, by her voice, her style, her brilliance.  It slaps me in the face, begs my attention for every single second, and entrances me with its beautiful, poetic imagery – and when I come off from the high I get in its beauty, I pay attention to the language.  What strikes hardest, however, is her persistant, never relenting use of language as a means of illustrating habits of individual thought, communities, and the combination of the two.  The rough style of Jacob’s Room and the fluid, almost imperceptible stream-of-consciousness narration in Mrs. Dalloway manage to capture moments in a profound complexity and wholeness, incorporating thoughts with the external world with the past, using repetition and digression to trace a particular mindset within a clearly painted landscape.  To read her is to read London!  I am almost tempted to call her prose poetry instead, as it barely conforms to typical grammar or syntax, choosing instead to play with language and grammar in order to display multiple aspects of life at once.  It is, quite simply, unfilmable.

That is what struck me most – I could not conceive of a cohesive, comprehensible way of filming these works and retaining their power.  You could film the plot that The Waves centers around, with the growth of these characters from childhood to adulthood, and even include the chapter introductory passages of the sun’s progress through the sky and all the various objects and creatures it illuminates, but something would be missing, something that film could not capture.  My favorite novels do that – they include some quality, some extra fineness to the details and descriptions that go deeper than just surfaces, but strive at an impressionistic or cubist dimension, or else they use a voice that, by way of being a voice and a speaking style, can’t be translated completely into a style of image.  It’s why I loved Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but wasn’t particularly impressed by the movie.  Sure, it was well-made and the acting was great, but I felt that the themes the novel presented were much more interesting and complex than the movie’s recapitulation of them (feel free to criticize me on this point, I need to see the movie again, so it’s possible I missed something from my first watching).

I’m not against movie adaptations of novels – Blade Runner is much better than its inspiration, Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep? The key question for a movie adaptation needs to be asked though: why do it?  There’s no need to simply translate the words into images.  More importantly, the movie should either alter or enhance aspects of the book, being a different medium.  It should utilize the technical aspects that a book can never provide: cinematography, soundtrack and music, flow of storytelling, etc.

But this goes farther than adaptations between mediums, and is far more inclusive than just cinema and prose & poetry.  I would like to take my hand at a multiplicity of mediums: prose, comics, film, theater, even drawing and painting.  But I don’t want to just to be pretentious – well, I’m sure that has something to do with it.  I’m immensely interested in the advantages of certain mediums over others in terms of form, style, technical qualities, etc.  When one produces a piece of art in a certain medium, one should strive towards using the medium to its fullest extent, which includes conveying meaning in ways that other mediums can’t.  Woolf called The Waves a “playpoem” because of its loose-connection to prose-writing as we think of it usually – it utilizes the full advantages and techniques of writing, to such an extent that it blurs the boundary of prose and poetry.  But even less experimental writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, and Nabokov (though he’s surely experimental too), write in styles that don’t just physically describe objects but use metaphors and other literary devices, and allow language to get at deeper impressions of life.  Citizen Kane is noted for its astounding use of the camera as a device to get deeper meaning from a visual story.  One needn’t be so great as these examples, nor as genius as Picasso, David Mazzucchelli, and numerous others.  But I think that any artist in any medium should consider his medium and wonder – what can I do with this that other mediums can’t?

At the same time, I think it’s also important to look at other mediums and wonder how the elements specific to them can be incorporated into your own.  Filmmakers, prose writers, and comics-writers all confessed to viewing their arts differently after the release of Citizen Kane.  Perhaps within the elements and qualities specific to prose there is something useful for the filmmaker, or the painter, or even the sculptor.  Every artistic medium has something special and unique to offer, and at the same time there is always a way to imitate those unique qualities in other mediums.  Somehow, you can produce music in a novel, metaphors in a film.  One must simply immerse himself completely into his artistic form, analyze it inside out, and then break every rule he knows.