Sunday, April 20, 2008

easy does it

so i started my paper, mammoth intimidating frozen work that it promises to be. and i find it has some surprises all its own.

it's tough to convey the context of a book, that you actually read it and aren't just jumping through hoops. i have to demonstrate i can critically evaluate poems.

there are precious few poems i care to evaluate, let alone hack apart into bloody bits for gawking and poking at.

but i've begun the process and it isn't as bad as i thought it would be. often, i find, dread requires more energy of me than just doing the thing.

how will this all weave together for a cohesive argument for my prof, i do not know. will he buy it? i don't know.

it comes to this, he doesn't have to buy what i'm selling. i simply have to make a damn fine case.

after i got his words on my last poems, which were esentially rendered "emotionally flat" a fellow student asked me how it felt.

these people don't define me or my writing.
i replied.

they have their opinions, and yes i have to listen, but i don't have to do what they say.

she was stunned.

i'm adorably hardheaded, i guess you could say.

but i haven't come all this way to roll over for some intellectual. it will not happen.

will i learn from them, god i hope so.
will i change my style or what i do? i hope not. that is not the point.

so, in contemplating this, i decided to dump the whole load on him. to let him have it, as it were. i was going to pick only my "strongest" poems for him to read, but then i thought, that is disingenuous personally. i cannot live that way.

you don't have to like what i do, hell, you don't have to even like me.

but you do have to put up with me if you so choose. part of that involves me having the courage, balls if you will, to be who i am, regardless of who's watching. (or gawking mouth agape as the case may be).

is it easy, no. hell no.

i get tired of laying all out there, but i don't know how to be anyone else. and i don't want to start now, pussy footing around someone because i respect them and their opinion. that is not integrity on my part. that is ass kissing, and i refuse, i simply refuse to do that.

i could say all the right things, the right way, to fashion my prose smooth and clean as they want me to (in fact, i have to for the critical writing part of this gig), but ultimately, this is where it's at. this is where our voices become stronger.

langston hughes handed in a poem for a final paper.

poets have to be brave. especially poets who have something to say. a new way of seeing.

i don't know that my way of seeing is all that new, i do know, when i am true to it, it rewards me and my readers.

if i can not let them run me off from my voice, my territory, if you will. i can thrive here.

having met a new friend who got online as i was beginning a poem, i finished it up and asked if she wanted to read it.

she did, so i emailed it. we chatted a bit, and i went on about my day.

the next time we got together, she told me how she sat at her computer and cried as she read it.

she said,
when someone says they are "a poet," this is met with a great deal of skepticism. so when you said you were writing a poem, i never expected it to affect me.


yes.
i said, smiling in the sun.

you have a gift,
she said.

thank you.


i don't know why this happens but it does.

i like to think of it as lorca's duende.

i may not have power or position, but i do have a voice. and i'll be damned if some college is going to deny me that voice.

No comments: