Carpe Diem

My fondest memory of my Junior year of High School was watching The Dead Poets Society.  I was enthralled by the characters' love for literature, and I found myself in a similar situation, although I was alone in that aspect.  But the most recognizable line from that film is simply: Carpe Diem.  Seize the day.

I find it interesting that someone who presumably loves writing as much as I do identified instead with a relatively passive phrase.  Bernard Cooper's short essay, "Que Sera Sera," attempts to take an objective view on the aspect of waiting for something.  He uses Cinderella and Rip Van Winkle as several examples from literature, but there is no argument presented.  He simply poses a dilemma, which causes the reader to wonder which is more important.  Do we wait, or do we live in the now?

Interestingly enough, we aren't actually given an answer.  Cooper doesn't even try to convince us one way or another.  It's as if he attempted to remove all bias completely, leaving little else in the short essay.  I would argue that the greatest works of literature are essentially arguments.  We can look toward Tolkien's famous trilogy, Sauron is evil because...  The small will become great...  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.   When we compare that to this, we end up wanting.  We don't find ourselves having a fulfilled answer by the end of the writing.  Perhaps that was Cooper's point, although in a more traditional essay, if one is going to ask a question, one should supply an answer.

I Name Thee...

Names have significance.  Names define things.  Long ago ships would be given names, giving them character.  The same with swords.

Why are we obsessed with names?

I don't have the answer for that.  Truthfully, I would very much love to investigate that question, but I don't have the motivation or the time.

Not so long ago, I researched my own name, and I found that it fit me perfectly.  Why does this happen?  Do we grow into them, or do they grow into us?

Again, I don't have an answer.  I don't think Bernard Cooper does either, given that his essay, By Any Other Name, didn't end up going anywhere other than the surface fascination of names.  It was a wonderful piece of work, like the kind I would actually enjoy reading off of my Facebook homepage.  It was thoughtful, but it only seemed to be a lot of thinking and one or two memories to springboard the brain.

To be perfectly honest, I have little to no experience with creative non-fiction.  There was one memoir a while back...  So I will comment only on the focus.  The focus of these creative "essays" seems to be purely thought, speculation, and reflection, whereas poetry was emotion, and stories were development.

Putting it short, it's a essentially a Facebook rant, albeit an intelligent one.

Self-Help For Writers

I suppose my biggest disappointment in the entirety of the Goldberg packet is the fact that there are so many opportunities to explore about the aspect of writing in large groups that we never did.  I would enjoy, especially, "Writing Marathons" as Goldberg describes them.  Writing and then sharing sounds like something that would be fascinating for me.  We learn by hearing ourselves, hearing others, and talking about it.

Improvement by practice is, from personal experience, the best way to attain better skills as a writer.  Reading self-help confidence-boosting blurbs comes out to about the bottom of the list.  Sorry Goldberg, but I don't need to "claim my writing."  I get it; it's mine: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The "everybody is a winner" speech doesn't really strike me as helpful.  I can write shitty; I realize that.  But that's where getting constructive criticism comes in.  With educated help, shit can be turned into gold.

And that is exactly what I want.  I don't need a confidence booster.  Artists typically have absolute and utter disdain for their work, and that's even after they're professional.  It's normal.  I shouldn't have to feign advice to prevent self-hatred.  Okay, so you don't like your stuff.  Get over it.  Somebody will love it, seriously.  But me?  I want to get better.  Improving my writing is my top priority.

Time Flies. People Fall.

Finality.  Such a fearsome word.  The end is the only certainty; this too shall pass.  Us.  Life.  We dream up various caricatures of death or the avoiding of it.  Be it the lumbering undead or immortal beings, death is an obsession, an addiction, and we're afraid of it.

Take all that you are, everything that mattered to you, and everything that forged your personal character.  Take it away.  We're afraid death will remove us from memory, from existence.  Will people remember us when we're gone?

The metaphor of this entirety of our cultures obsession with death is no better exemplified by "The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati.  Marta, at nineteen years of age, leaps off the edge of a skyscraper.  On the way down, time seems to slow.  People ask her where she's going, why she's headed to her destination.  As she progresses further down, she begins to notice others falling with her, as well as her finding of her own insecurity; she compared herself to the others.  Near the end, she becomes aware of her age, which progressed with the drop in altitude.  Before she even hits the ground, she becomes nothing more than dust.

Buzzati miraculously juxtaposes the thought of suicide and living one's life.  People always restless, moving, and trying to make it somewhere have already killed who they are.  They just haven't hit the ground yet.  Marta always said she was going somewhere, and was hopeful about it, and she looked back during her fall to see the skyscraper, which was once beautiful, sweet.  It became sinister and cold as it stared back.  "You could have done differently," it may as well have whispered back at her.  During the descent, Marta became increasingly unsatisfied with herself.  Regretful is a choice word.

Does leaving a legacy behind truly matter?  What is the point of being alive if living is a secondary goal?  I would argue that Buzzati is trying to tell us this very thing.  Falling is irreversible once we jump.  Why take the plunge before we're ready?

Exposition... Exposition Everywhere...

Could somebody please explain to me how exactly I could purchase a series of short stories and wind up reading a series of lectures?  I expected something... well... something from "Juice," maybe even something good, and now I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a new hallucinatory drug on the streets referred to as "juice."

I started reading with a hopeful heart.  On my break from work, I spent my half hour waiting in line for food and then sitting in front of the small pages with a burger in my hands.  The words droned on and on like an endless, animalistic bleat.  Goats could have been significantly more entertaining, even if they managed to piss on my work uniform (seriously, they "go" everywhere).  After a while, I wondered why exactly I'm supposed to care about this main character who is alone and constantly touching herself.

"Translation" was like a nightmarish version of Cast Away, but without any sympathy or sense.  What happened?  When is this?  Why does this matter?  I received no answers, leaving me with a bitter taste in my mouth after reading.  Gladman has a very sophisticated voice that did not in any way match the mood of the story.  It is great for writing essays, not stories.  Given that it is written in present tense, we should be getting fresh, off the cuff thoughts and phrases.  We should be placed right into the action, experiencing the narrator's emotions, wants, hopes, and fears.  What I got was exposition, exposition, exposition.

"My new home is right outside the shelter.  Of course I would want to go there and hang out with the things that root my people.  The hope being that upon their return I will have missed them less."

See, now I recall something heavily being stressed last class period.  DETAIL.  I remember us talking about describing something without actually saying it.  I remember applying that to my own writing.  Why on earth are we reading something that doesn't follow the class focus?  Unless this is an example of what NOT to do, I'm at a loss.

Here is how I would have written those three sentences above:

"Bits and bobbles of years past litter the mouth of the cave.  Their colors faded hues of blues, pinks, and gray, purposes meaningless and lost to me.  My hands chafe on the rough wooden surface of the makeshift planks that I pile nearby, turning the my light palms to a deep sunset red.  A throbbing sensation begins to set in, but I grit my teeth and strain to build my shelter.  Home.  Is it really home?  So close to what they were, what my village was, I can but turn to see the memories of a long forgotten past sitting there in the darkness of the cave.  The Past Shelter.  As I sit down in my newly assembled shack, I can't help but notice how empty it is.  Where are they?  Where?"

But instead, Gladman only tells us where things are and what the protagonist is thinking on in a tone that does not fit the setting.  If you were alone forever, would you stay so level-headed?  It fascinates me how Gladman is able to say absolutely nothing with so many words.  We receive absolutely no emotion in the entire piece, and we can't even get a clear image of what is going on.  What the actual hell is happening?  I don't know, and, after reading, I don't care.

And that is one of the biggest problems in the history of writing.  People love to hear about people they love to hear about.  When I don't know some random character in some random situation that only talks about what is going on (unclearly, I might add), the only thing that crosses my mind that resembles concern is the question: "I spent money on THIS?"  Renee Gladman obviously never heard the phrase, "Show, don't tell."  As a published author, she has no excuse... although I may just be living in a fantasy world; they seem to let anybody become published these days.

Perspectives and Post Cards

They say a picture's worth a thousand words.  I was given three, and I made a short story within... what?  A half hour?  Obviously, it didn't reach the supposed word cap.  Not even close.  That's why they're short stories.

This week's class (the only one, praise be) was staring at three post cards and describing them.  Then, after we described them, we were supposed to include each image in a short story.  I described one post card, saying that, "Had I known about what the assignment was before I picked the card, I would have avoided this one like the plague."  I must admit that the descriptions beforehand felt very dry at first.  The question as to what exactly the point was eluded me until I started to actually write the story.

But that was quite a way away yet, I was sitting with contempt brewing in my veins until I was tasked to connect the cards... somehow.  How on earth was I supposed to connect a weird painting, a nearly frozen pond, and a picture of the Mackinac Bridge?  Well, I found a way.

I spring-boarded off the fact that one post card looked like it was a painting.  I first imagined-up an art gallery.  Given my pointedly dark taste for stories, I added a little dust to it.  Now there was a story behind the painting.  Why was it dusty?  Why didn't people view it?

As a sort of parallel to the unwanted picture, I added a character who equally didn't belong.  The narrator has a very strong and analytical personality.  He swears occasionally, yes, but I've heard it said that real people don't censor themselves, and he does it only in his mind.  He was, I pictured, wearing a brown and slightly ragged suit, in stark comparison to the black and white expensive outfits surrounding him.  We understood that he was different at that point, and then he needed a reason for being somewhere he didn't belong.

The answer: the painting.  It seemed natural to connect the two, especially since they complement each other so well.  So I set to work with the oldest motivation for a man being in a place where he didn't belong.  Women.  Or, in this case, a woman.

After I get the general idea down, I just sort of charge into the work.  I don't draw out an outline, not for a short story, because I start to lose my "writing mood" that I got myself into.  The freshness wears away, and it becomes stale.  Short stories have so little time to be engaging.  They need to say something, even if the characters themselves don't actually change themselves.

Try it out for yourself, if you like.  Let go.  Figure out which cardinal direction you're going in, like North, and just go.  Maybe you'll hit a river that takes you a little to the East, and you might have to backtrack down South until you can get around something.  That's okay, but you learn the terrain as you go.  There's always time for revision later, especially now that the 2012 panic is over and you don't have to worry about the "end of the world..." until the next one rolls around.

And if that doesn't work out for you, I apologize.  No refunds.  Buyer beware.  What works for me won't work for everyone, and I know already that it doesn't.  Writing is something, I believe, that sits very close to the soul.  It'll be different for everyone.  I encourage you to try.

Fragmented Mentality

I am crazy.

My first realization of this was when I wrote a short story titled, "The Broken Window."  As I recorded what happened to the protagonist, whose mental state is called to question, I discovered he had a profound effect on me.  The terrible things that happened to him distressed me quite a bit, but the insanity came from more than just sympathizing for him.

He started to talk to me.  It wasn't a communication of words, per se, nor was it a Fight Club-esque hallucination.  As his own personality developed from the first few parts of the story, I felt as though his intersected with my own in some places.  In the middle of writing it, I remember freaking out because I reacted to something in school in the way that he would have, rather than myself.

Needless to say, I was glad once I finally forced him into the paper, out of my head.

But this entire episode revisited my memory because of the packet we read, by Lamott.  "Polaroids" talked about how characters come to life.  They begin as blank ideas before turning into full fledged persons.  They start wanting things on their own, doing things independently, and even rebelling.  They become real, not just to the writer, but in actuality.

Now I know what you're thinking.  "This kid's freakin' nuts!"  And, I would wholeheartedly agree.  Maybe you have to be crazy to be a writer; I don't know.  What I do know is this: stories come to life.  Maybe it can be explained away using the firing of certain neurons, but whatever causes this change doesn't matter.  I'm stuck with it and so are my fellow writers.

Short Stories: A One-Night-Stand?

As an avid reader and writer, I find myself thinking about stories more and more romantically, almost.  Not to say that I enjoy the cut and dry Disney production that follows the exact same plot structure to the letter (but that's a different rant).  No, I am more referring to comparing stories to women.  I can list a few similarities: I don't understand either very well, both seem to do whatever they want, regardless of my advice and urging, and sometimes they don't make sense until we arrive at the end.  And before you cue up the angry mob, I'm not bashing women in any way.  I love stories, and I love women.

And because I love both, I almost look at reading a story the same way one would "court" a woman.  Call me old fashioned, but I do favor a relatively casual and slow speed.  There is a sort of peaked interest initially, given the first two or three chapters.  Then we arrive at the act of pursuing, which requires much more effort.  This process involves sacrificing a lot of personal time and energy, getting "acquainted" almost.  As we approach around the middle of the book, I find myself thinking more and more about the book (assuming I still like it at this point), before I finally, after all this time, reach the climax and resolution, thus either solidifying my relationship with the book or completely ending it.

Short stories present a complex issue with my... interesting reading process.  You see, some short stories have clear and developed thoughts that end up staying with me forever, which is the point.  Stories are supposed to have developed thoughts; they're supposed to arrive somewhere at the end.  When I first experienced the "Mystery Stories" (The quotes are meant to be sarcastic, not proper.), I felt like I had just experienced the reader's equivalent of a one night stand.

We didn't know each other too well, I was so disoriented I wasn't sure that I could make proper judgement calls about my actions, and arrived at the climax way too quickly without even a satisfying assurance that this would resolve itself well.  (In case you're wondering, it didn't.)  I woke up alone, wondering where the point had gone and why it had left without even saying hello or goodbye.

Here we arrive at the brash and fiery difference between stories and garbage that reflects the line between structured poetry and poetry-looking shit (you may know it as typical free verse).  You can't chuck out a paragraph of words and call it "Literature."  That's like painting a white line down a red canvas and calling it "Modern art."  You didn't create a painting, you drew a ping-pong table.  Poetry needs meaning (which can be achieved without structure, I do realize; it is simply immensely difficult), and stories need thought.

But I'm getting off topic.  The point being that while poetry contains raw emotion, stories contain movement of thought.  We start somewhere and arrive somewhere else.  Nobody would ever read a story about a turtle that never moved, ate, shit, or died.  Our thoughts need to go somewhere.  "Internal" by Brian Evenson was a wonderful example of an actual story.

I found myself asking questions throughout the reading (much like my friend Maryia did when we watched Donnie Darko together just yesterday).  I wanted to ascertain what was actually going on, it was a mystery (more so than the "Mystery Stories" were anyway).  I was invested in the protagonist and what he/she was going through.  I felt that I knew who he/she was as a person, and that essentially grounded my interest and made it flourish into an actual relationship.  I was there with the protagonist as our sanity eroded into nothing.  Together.

My advice to my fellow writers: slow down.  Like essays and girls' skirts, they need to be long enough to cover everything and short enough to keep people interested.  But, following today's latest fashion craze, we're practically removing the skirt completely.  "Forget thinking about what's happening, LOOK AT WHAT'S HAPPENING!"  I can appreciate wanting to leave a relatively open ending, to which the reader is free to interpret what is going on, but they shouldn't have to interpret the entire. Damn. Story.  It's perfectly acceptable to end with a mind-fuck resolution, but when you take the mind out of a story then you're just left with... Fuck.

Warning: Contains Strong Language

Fuck prestige.

Our society puts so much stress on social standing and titles that we forget what it actually means to have them.  If you're rich, everyone wants to be your friend.  If you're poor, you're stupid.  If you're homeless, you're lazy.  (Never mind the fact that the system was built by the rich for the rich.)  Take tuition costs for example.  We put an ungodly amount of money and time into getting a piece of paper that says we know something.  Do we really know it by the time we walk across the raised platform to grab a scroll and shake somebody's hand?

Have you ever had a teacher who was full of him/herself?  I'd bet the so-called educator spouted "impressive" titles like degrees or even publications that the instructor was responsible for.  It was always about prestige "earned" for bullshitting assignments for four-to-seven years.  We can still get degrees with C's for God's sake!  Here's my final question about this person you suffered to know: Were they good at teaching?

In my case, no.  My "College writing" teacher in twelfth grade did nothing of the sort.  He had us write one research paper, and then pulled various fluffy projects out of... thin air.  Nobody could say anything because he was in a position of authority.  Nobody could do anything because he would fail them.  Nobody could learn because he was the teacher.

This man had multiple degrees in literature and even performing arts, while Mark Twain had no formal education.  See the difference?  Twain was invited to speak at Princeton, and Oxford had even given him an honorary Doctorate.  Society didn't value time spent at a particular institution worth congratulating, but what a person did to deserve a title truly earned.

The "Father of American Literature" didn't go to school.

Ain't that irony for you.  But this inability to criticize isn't simply infecting relationships between teacher and student, it's between classmates as well.

In Creative Writing on Thursday, we shared our poems with our classmates.  One person, whose poem I did read (and even enjoyed), claimed that it was "awful."  I would have argued fervently against that.  Alas, he seemed to have no self-confidence in his work.  This wasn't the first time that I have encountered this phenomenon.  Many of my peers who have experienced this self-loathing explained to me that it was rooted to the fact that they (not including the man mentioned above, although I would assume that he would tell me something similar) were nobody.  We have writer-idols already, and we believe them to be good.  Society claims them to be gods with pens.  And suggests, ridiculously, that criticizing anybody with a publication is taboo.  An oppressive wave of "your opinion doesn't matter" can evolve into a grotesque "your work doesn't matter."  And thus we arrive at the "I'm a horrible writer because I'll never be as good as them."

When I got my own poem back, I noticed a blatant lack of constructive criticism, or criticism of any kind.  Everything was simply, "This is what you did and I liked it because it was nice."  As an obsessive writer who constantly wishes to improve, this was somewhat distressing for me.  The way my mind works is essentially this: if I'm not being told that I am doing something wrong, I'm damn perfect...  No, not really.  I'm speaking in hyperbole of course, but the message can easily be translated into one sentence.  I can't improve if you don't tell me what's wrong.  No, seriously, I want you to take apart my work.  Tear it to shreds and piss on the scraps if you have to, just help me get better.  Society tells you, "No, he says he's a writer."  "You might hurt his feelings."  "He probably worked really hard on that."  I say, "To hell with it all, what did you really think of it?  I deserve that much honesty!"

In this day and age, one can never tell if one is good at something, or if one was just never told the truth.

Tell me the truth damn it!

Drowning in the Crowd

As a sort of deviant-slash-migrant, I have needed to learn how to swim through large groups of people fluidly.  I am no stranger to the packed hallways and loaded streets of the cities.  Without a backpack loaded with schoolwork, I can easily weave through the gaps between strangers until I make it to my destination.  Never have I needed this skill in places where people are considerate of others or aware of the world outside of themselves.

In my Psychology 101 class, we discussed the strange phenomenon of the "diffusion of responsibility."  If you've heard of the story of Kitty Genovese, then I don't need to explain.  If you haven't, then a quick internet search will enlighten you with a very dark story.  But the unfortunate truth is that apathy is rampant throughout our cities.  We see something wrong happen, and we don't want to get involved.  "I might get hurt." "It's not my problem." "What could I possibly do?" are some of the many excuses that I've heard people say.  The bottom line is that we dub actions of a few "heroic" when they are things we all should do.  How sad that we must put people on pedestals for doing what is right, what is expected, because none of us have the guts to do it ourselves.

There is a sort of "silence" that Ed Roberson alludes to in his poem "Idyll."  I would argue that the "silence" he speaks about is actually apathy.

"as those closely peopled increase,
certain silences are reached"

 When you walk down the street, how many people do you acknowledge?  How many people do you say hello to?  How many people do you even look at?  We don't say hello because it's weird.  We don't complement people on their clothes, their style, because they might think we're freaks.  And God help the guy who tries to hug someone.

The very fitting irony of the title of the poem itself is that idyll is supposed to describe an extremely happy or picturesque scene.  Walk down the streets Roberson describes.  Do you feel happy?  Does everyone you pass look happy?

"those many dropped-here moments

of lives pooled in the flow, their movement
suddenly one,                smoothed"

 Surely you can agree with me in that, the answer is no.  People seem to be swept away in rogue waves, the tides of rush hour, or in the standalone stream.  We're carried away by the currents that control our lives.  From the mouth, to the brook, we never make it to shore.  Sometimes we lie stagnant for a time, gasping for air in the water around us, shortly before starting off again.

No, "Idyll" is far from idyllic.  It is an outcry of the hundreds killed because someone wouldn't get involved.  The poem depicts the harsh apathy and sheer uncaring, cold waters of large cities.  I can swim these waters, because I've been thrown into them before.

But far too many drown.

I Spy... Suicide

One of the more miraculous things about poetry is the open interpretation of it all.  To refer back to that "Artistic Bias" I mentioned in the last post, I saw something in a poem that probably shouldn't be there.  Suicide.

Sure we've all seen the wonderful posts on Facebook urging us to like the page and pay our respects to a kid who we didn't really know, don't really care about, and probably won't remember next week.  The unfortunate finality of death is illustrated in technicolor via the carelessness and forgetfulness of the modern-day individual.  We have short attention spans, and when you're out of style, you're out of sight.  And you know what they say about being out of sight...

We comfort ourselves in the knowledge that, had we known just how unhappy that person was, we would have been their friend, bought them ice cream, or even invited them to our birthday party.  All the while we ignore the fact that people who feel trapped inside are not shouting it to the world around them.  When you feel as though your life doesn't matter, you don't go looking for help and you don't want to tell anyone.

All of this was going through my mind as I attempted to decipher the meaning behind Ed Roberson's "Beauty's Standing" poem number six.  I was intrigued by the title: "(the first causality is where you live)" and I can't help but agree with it in retrospect.  As someone who moved around a lot during my childhood, I can tell you that various places have had profound effects on me.  When I was going through verbal and physical abuse in First grade, I developed a curious "light touch" as a coping mechanism.  I thought that the material possessions of my bullying classmates could help my happiness, seeing as they appeared content so long as they had them.  Noticing my daily new band-aids, my parents decided to home school their children.  Living completely at home then, I was able to be truly happy.  When I returned to the world of institutionalized education after moving, I was once again thrown into a world of verbal abuse.  "You dance?  You must be gay."  I was ostracized and labeled as a fag.

"see the red shadow of the ghost crossing the walls
where we live"

This idea of a red shadow has me imagining a boy lying in a pool of his own blood.  The blood surrounds his body, slightly resembling a red shadow.  As a ghost haunting the "quiet house" in the beginning of the poem, why shouldn't he adopt a red shadow to silhouette his movements, as a gruesome reminder to people wondering what happened?  If it was hatred that killed him, and then apathy that forgot him, why shouldn't he serve as a testament to how much hurt doing nothing can bring about?

I started to scratch, burn, and cut myself around my freshman year of High School.  None of those really stuck, but the problems causing them didn't leave.  I have a short blade of Greek design.  Hours would pass of me staring at the naked sword sitting in my hands.  My heart screamed, "Oh happy dagger, here is thy sheath!"  (And you thought I was kidding when I told you depression got me into English.)
  

"...revolving patrol
lights a spun radiant weapon a night-
stick elucidation..."

For some, it takes a true disaster to break imaginary world they live in.  This image of a police cruiser sitting in the driveway across the street is unshakable.  Imagine that your best friend lived across the street from you.  Now imagine one night where there are red lights revolving, lighting up the neighborhood as they rotate around their small globes, sending a gleam off the officer's nightstick as he enters the silent house.

Proximity makes the tragedy.  How close are you to what happened?  When we look at what happened in Haiti a while back (if you can still remember that is), we find a wonderful example of how distorted distance makes things.  In one of my more recent classes, a student told me that she found the events that took place inspiring.  She found happiness in an absolutely bleak world.  Would she have found it if she experienced it?  If her best friend experienced it?  If her family?  No.  The tragedy became a comedy, according to theatrical standards, in her mind as she was safe and sound several thousand miles away.

If you are in my Creative Writing class, reading this, and you mention something like "Poor you," or "Are you okay now?" then I very well might laugh on the inside.  Before the semester started, I hadn't existed in your world.  My story is not ground breaking or astounding.  It's common.  It's normal.  Some of this, I haven't even shared with my closest friends.  None of it, I want to.

This poem drew out darkness from me like a needle.  Black and red, shadow and blood, this is what I see crossing the walls, Mr. Roberson.  I see death.  My death.

I spy... suicide.

Pesky Poetry Packets

Poetry, for me, has always been about painting pretty pictures with words.  Not.  Actually, the despairing and darker themes has always attracted me more than the "life is full of pretty rainbows" kind of stuff.

But still, the ability to describe something as elaborate and impossible as an emotion using words was always something I admired.  You can imagine my shock when Professor Darling told me to look at the use of language rather than meaning.  "Woah, wait... what am I supposed to do?" could probably best describe the thought process that I was going through.  It was like taking the girl out of a wonderful walk on the beach and the picnic afterwards.  All the elements of a date were there, except the driving force behind them.

So I took to the poetry packets with a purposefully blind eye, annotating dual meanings of certain words and underlining interesting word choices.  The poems were, remarkably, without bias.  When we discussed them in class, various groups shouted their separate interpretations across the room (I'm speaking in hyperbole of course) and I noticed something strange.  Each individual interpretation was only voiced by one member of a certain group.  Does that mean that there was a consensus on the meaning behind the poem?  Had all of them deduced a meaning prior to?  Or was it just that there was one really persuasive speaker in every group?  I would like to believe that my classmates were in the same position that I was, but that assumption would be both egocentric and unfounded.  It's a sort of double-edged optimism.

My group believed that "Where It Passes, Untouchable" talked about a person outside of the writer's self.  We believed that the "mirror's tain" represented an aspect about that "other" that was completely unyielding.  Then another group completely ripped the heart out of my theory and fed on the dripping flesh that was still trying to beat, quoting the same lines and using them as a foundation for the belief that the writer was talking about an aspect about him/herself that he/she hated.  I found myself agreeing with that group, rather than my own.  I felt unqualified to argue, and that my own position was built upon sand.  My lack of dissection and hunting for the meaning made me feel as though I was inexperienced.  I am no stranger to poetry, but I felt strange nonetheless.

What did I mean when I said that the poems were without bias?  When we see ourselves in a work of art, through suffering or objectivity in an abstract or even concrete way, that is bias.  Artistic bias, I would call it.  Naturally, this is something that I do in poetry (hence the attraction to the macabre).  Depression was what got me into writing poetry, and poetry got me out of it.  But when I remove the "artistic bias" of a good ol' fashioned poetry reading, it becomes a pile of nonsense.  Poetry without purpose becomes pointless.  Perhaps it's the cynicism coursing in my veins, but I find myself asking, "What did I really get out of this poem?"  The answer is simply: nothing.

The meaning behind the assignment, however, I find myself scrutinizing very much like a poem.  In the great words of Anton Chekhov, "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.  If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.  If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."  Perhaps it's the writer in me, but I almost see myself as part of a story.  This assignment wasn't given with no purpose.  Something is supposed to "be fired."  If anything, this assignment illustrates the need for something beyond words to be placed into poetry.  That's what separates it from prose.  You don't just read about the hero going to this place to kill this guy, you feel it.

And that may be why not everyone can write poetry.  There needs to be some super-charged emotion feeding into the words like a sieve.  The raw energy waters the piece, leaving out the pollutants of reason and logic.  Sometimes we hold onto those pollutants like crutches, others don't even recover from their injury.

This assignment taught me that poetry's ammunition is emotion and meaning.  We like it because we can put ourselves in the writer's shoes.  We shut up and take time out of our day to listen to and read it because it tells us that there is something at work beyond the boring world of one plus one equals two.  If half of the class feels the way that I do, then this class is a loaded pistol just waiting to go off.  Damn, do I want that gun to fire.

Introduce Yourself

I am a writer.

I started writing in sixth grade.  The beginnings of what would be a very long and stressful road were very rugged, to say the least.  My earliest work (which has been deleted) could be best described as the "cutest train wreck possible."  Droll attempts compounded with icing of ignorance and fumbling decor became a disaster with lit candles on top.

So, like any other middle school student who meets something they think is hard, I decided that I hated writing.  Despite the various writing assignments that I continued to excel at in my seventh grade English class (which I had blocked from memory), I was set in my bubble of failure that my mind had blown.  Ninth grade popped that bubble.  I realized that I didn't hate English.  A certain fascination with poetry brought me back into the realm of language and its elegant use.  But it wasn't until a year later that I had decided that I was good at writing... and became obsessed with it.

If you've known me for any length of time, you'd know that I am trying to become a writer.  I don't know if you can see it in my walk, or my speech and mannerisms, but it is night and day to me.  The beginnings of what has exploded into a trilogy have been rolling around in my head for the past two-three years (I don't even remember).  My world has grayed into what is my story and reality.  I see its foundations as two hundred years of history, not fiction.  It has become its own world, wanted things for itself, and dragged me along as it assimilated or discarded various aspects.  My story is a living, breathing thing beyond my control.  If it is in my power or capacity, I will write it.  I have to.