Personal reflection:
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” ― Charles Bukowski What am I doing here: Finding poetry about places, speaking about emotions, relating to issues, reflecting on events... and letting coffees be the medium. I think when we see ourselves, there are so many truths to accept. Histories. Topics. Issues. People. Places. Emotions. Events. Countries. Ourselves. I have been the little girl in LosAngeles who knew 10 different knots and could identify poisonous plants in the hills. I have been the girl who can swim in the ocean. I have been the girl in the wheelchair, I have been the girl with the disfigured face, I have been the girl in the background of the school play, I have been the girl who played a trumpet, I have been the girl who kept her mouth shut, I have been the girl who listened, I have been the girl who screamed, I have been the girl who had no home, I have been the girl who soldiered on. I have been these things, and these are truths I have to accept because they are truths. Poetry has always been an interesting aspect in the gem of reality since it is the trigger of the poet. The poet pulls the trigger of poetry and all of a sudden, the explosion of language comes barreling out and the poet is able to reshape their reality onto a target they have chosen. I have become a woman who loves life. I have become a woman who loves a man. I have become a woman who loves her children. I have become a woman who loves the sun, and the air, and the ground I can touch. I have become a woman who can hold the language from my mouth in her fingers and create a narrative which will speak to my children and reflect on the world, and the poets before me. What I read in poetry are the words that a poet uses. When I read Elizabeth Bishop’s stanza: “ where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home;” I hear where she came from. Orphaned from her parents and raised in a wilderness of domesticity, raised by the winds of Nova Scotia and the seasons of farming. Later pulled into another part of her family, then to another, and to another…she found respite in poetry. The nagging questions of “who am I,” amidst an ever amended family environment, or even more daunting, “what do I have to say” are the words I see in her work. Is she interested in explaining how the wind in Nova Scotia is hardly a childhood playmate? The connections between people are as malleable as her cigarette smoke? The reality she perceives is only as real as she believes it to be? Maybe. More than likely, she chooses to write a poem about a fish. A great, big, long, detailed poem about every single scale, fin and smell on this fish. Because it isn’t that I don’t see the emotional mosaic that she has networked within herself; I see her as admitting to the truth that although there are constraints on the scale of language to explain the depths of human suffering, of human joy, of human endurance, she will instead explain this…all of this in the depth of observing a beautiful, colorful fish who once lived. These are the words Elizabeth Bishop used to write her narrative. Tracy K. Smith, on the other hand, is such an amazing poet; she was raised in Fairfield, California but has “deep roots” in Alabama. I completed my childhood and began my adult endeavor in Vacaville, California (a neighbor of Fairfield), but I also did not choose to associate myself with this area. It was dead. It was suburban. There was nothing I could stare at besides the horizon and wonder what was beyond it, who built the horizon, how far away is the horizon and when I got a car, how much gas do I need in my car to get there: In a similar path to both Smith and Bishop, I was raised in LosAngeles and spent a fair amount of time wandering until I landed on an island in Washington… but my deep roots are in Nova Scotia, which is where my family lives. Granted, a family I have never met since there are just too many miles and not enough dimes between LosAngeles and NovaScotia. So, as I have never been to Nova Scotia, I wonder if Smith has ever been to Alabama? After accepting the truths of where you came from, the many places in which you were raised, and the wild landscape of childhood upon which you ascended into maturity, the question must be begged of, who are you? If you refuse the air in which you were raised and even the very land you stand upon? Perhaps you rewrite reality and place your narrative on Mars. I wonder, who we would be without poets recreating reality for us. We wouldn’t know what Harlem felt like without Langston Hughes; we wouldn’t know what a woman’s footsteps sounded like without Maya Angelou; we wouldn’t understand the depth of grief without the hills on Frost’s farm in New Hampshire; we wouldn’t understand the communal madness which rages in our souls without Ginsberg; we could not fathom the significance of our imagination without Stevens’s words ramrodding his ministry down the lines of his poems… And with that, I am left with the image of myself. Who am I, and who have I become. Where is my narrative and where will I take it. Which land will I take deep roots in, and where will I go in the future. I will say with the boldest audacity that I am happy with how my writing has changed throughout this semester. As with most adventures in my life I began terrified and ended triumphant. I realize that the simple, uncomplicated words I use can hold a greater depth than the longest most ostentatious length of poetry. Grace and poise go farther than leathers and motorcycles. I do not have to be a radical in order to say something. I have my own words to use. Be Coco Chanel. Not Elton John. Well, maybe a little bit of Elton John… I accept that who I am now, perhaps a housewife according to the IRS, perhaps a student, perhaps an aspirational writer to journals, perhaps a woman who is holed away in a quiet forest on an island, who has the same ink as Virginia Woolf, and the same paper as Emily Dickinson, and the same ambition as Elizabeth Bishop and the same personal organizational skills, and timeline, as Charles Bukowski. Bukowski, God bless him, wrote his entire adult life with small acclaim in his early years…but flourished later. I would like to think that, similarly, I will be able to reshape my words throughout my life into pieces which reflect the urgent desire I have to create poetry…poetry which will continue to reshape who I am, and will reshape the reader into something different within who they are. Maybe something the same. Above all, something worth reading. That is what I am doing here: Finding poetry in places, speaking about emotions, relating to issues, reflecting on events... and letting coffees be the medium through which we read poetry in our lives. |