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.