Poetry-Mid-Term-Self-Evaluation-Kinda
I’m a narrator. The kind of writer that narrates. To me, it’s more of an identity than it is an actual description. It’s a way of looking at things differently, of living in a context that is framed through some abnormal view of my mind’s basic functions. I recently spoke to a girl who asked me if I narrate my life in my head as it happens. It took me a moment to answer, and when I did, I said, “Yes, but only in the first-person point-of-view.” I thought it was some kind of trick question, because everyone does that, don’t they? You walk down the street to get some ice cream and you think, “I’m walking down the street to get some ice cream.” If you see something interesting you think, “There’s a strange little dog wearing pants under that lady’s umbrella skirt.” But the same girl told me that out of a classful of students asked the same question, all but one of them kept their arms hanging at their sides. Their brains work differently. Maybe instead of words, a sea of images and smells and sounds fill their heads, a big soup. A mash-up of consciousness. It’s a cool thing to try to imagine, like when I was twelve and I realized that the colors I saw and associated with the words green, brown, red, and yellow might not be the actual colors other people see - that there would be no way to discern whose vision was the “right” one. But I’m getting off topic. What I’m trying to illustrate is that the way writing works in my life is as an extension of how my brain functions. And if the default language of my brain is narration, poetry is a foreign language. The analogy works so well that it almost isn’t one anymore. I’ll explain that.
I’ve been writing poemy poems, for the most part, during the first half of the semester. Each time I tried to take my idea of what a poem should be, and do, and change that. I won’t say that I think my poems were embodiments of those ideals, but they were excercises that helped me think in different ways how poems operate, or how they should. The focus was never on good and bad, but more on what worked. What was effective. Feedback helped me ascertain just which details evoked the right image, or whether or not some invented images (or intentionally ambiguous ones) produced a false positive. For example, in my poem “Nothing About You,” I included the detail “wet anger.” Originally, I only had anger, but it sounded as if there should be a word in front of it. As a joke, I picked “wet.” Not a dirty joke, but like “ha, this means nothing.” Oddly enough, however, in class two or three people remarked how they liked it, and that some even “related.” I don’t know what image “wet anger” evokes, but whatever it was it’s not what I intended (since I intended nothing). This was one of the ways I learned about how the images or details in a poem work towards being as effective as it should. Another example of this kind of experimentation happened in my poem, “Never-Pictures.” I mashed together a bunch of images and tried to see if they could work as a cohesive whole. Only, they didn’t. The idea was well-received, but as for the images, I was told they seemed random or lacked the proper frame or context in which to see them.
I want to get back to that idea of learning poetry as a new language inside my head now (it all fits together, I promise - this is still rising action) and the experience I had while trying to write my prose poem. I wrote the first line in poetry mode. It sounded good. It fit all the requirements for poetry in my head while still being narration. The trouble came after that. See, I sat there trying to write line after line unsuccessfully, because nothing that came after that line sounded as good as the first one did. It was all wrong. I was about to scrap the thing. Then I sat back and realized that I shouldn’t be trying to go at it like a poet, but like a narrator. After that, I had a moment of code-switching in my brain, much like the one I experience when I speak Spanish. I can’t just switch, I have to prepare myself to do it. I have to load the software. Or in the case of this prose poem, unload it. It is because of this moment of mental “switching” that I have a hard time considering that poem, “Just Pieces Falling in a Breeze,” a poem at all. I feel like I cheated because, but for the first line, I didn’t write it in poet mode.
The other thing I wanted to address was the way learning the second language helps the first. I’m going to pick one specific way in which it does so instead of being vague and making generalizations (which is what every essay does, and I’m trying to make this as un-essayical as I can. Perhaps you’ve noticed). The main thing I’ve tried to learn about poetry is the effectiveness of the words used to convey the intended image and feeling, and the strength simile and metaphor can have when they’re used correctly. Also, when a detail is strengthened by such things or weakened by them. So, when I wrote prose before, I had a tendency to skip those things altogether, metaphor and such, because I was unsure just what they were doing, or how they were functioning in regards to the words they were supposed to be strengthening. A lot of my fiction is just straight narration, without frills. And sometimes I like that - but I feel like being a writer, and the journey to becoming the fullest and most complete writer I can be, has to be about being able to do the most for what a situation or story needs at that time. That’s what I feel like learning the poetry language has helped me to do, even though you wouldn’t know it, because this essay has taken a turn for the vague, even though I said it wouldn’t. Oh well. Sometimes I lie. It’s why I write fiction and not non-fiction.
My name is Adam Holwerda. 