Currently, I'm taking a class on revision of both poetry and fiction, and I've been trying to step back and evaluate myself as a writer. Studying writing has shown me that your work always has to go through an infancy stage.
The first draft of any poem has a raw and ugly state that is trying to reach towards some greater development. It's as if the poem is trying to grow into its own skin in the same fashion a child would grow into its features as it gets older.
I find a lot of what can hold me back in my writing is not accepting the infancy stage. I suppose it's natural to want to get through the awkward stages of development and immediately attain the end result. Part of the writing process is to reject. However, I'm starting to notice I can grow impatient, and that's what can really kill a poem or any type of writing for that matter. Instead of writing the poem, I start to bully it into being finished.
Something we've been discussing in another class I'm taking is the importance of surprise in writing. It reminds me of a quote from Ray Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine: "I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies."
This quote is something I always turn back to or think of when I start to get into an obsessive state of, "This needs to be finished now." Strangely enough, it ties back to what I've been learning. Maybe casting away immediate judgment on a poem's imperfections, and letting the poem surprise us in its beginning stages, is paramount to finding where the poem wants to arrive.
One of my professors talks about being able to remain in a state of play when you're in the process of writing or revision. And it makes sense. How I understand it is that--without play--you allow yourself to become rigid, and you lose the organic development of the poem. You start imposing your own ideas of where you want the poem to go, and you stop listening to the natural direction the poem wants and knows it can take. Everything becomes predetermined.
But, much like a child needs discipline and boundaries before it can decide what to reject or accept on its own, a poem needs discipline as well: form, structure, line breaks, etc. The problem is throwing the discipline on the poem and expecting it to not resist you. You can't expect children not to have temper tantrums once in a while, and you can't expect a poem to be wrangled and not fight back in the beginning.
My point is, if we completely reject the temper tantrums and raw state of the poem, we can shut down the poem entirely. In the same way, a child will shut down if we can't accept that we need to allow them to work through their emotions, so they can function as adults.
I notice that I've started shunning my poems from seeing the light of day if they're not immediately finished or perfect.
So, to be more accepting of the infancy stage, here is a poem that is still a work in progress that I'm planning on revising:
Fragments: Elegy for an Illness
My illness has brought me
to many homes lingered in
my skin.
I could drown you
in a thousand songs.
The world is a smudge
on everything I used to know.
When everyone asks
how I am, I should just lie.
My illness barrels in my bones and walks
over my face. Some kind of crawling.
Certain people can be happy
even when dying.
Even grease shines
and we wash it away.
All my words are
unnecessary in the moment.
Later, I will think about what’s said,
“Everyone is someone’s
cancer. Nobody told us who
would need us to be ourselves."
Behind what forward looks like,
there’s a breath that sits inside
and leaves. Explain the pulsing
in my feet turning down the road
of veins. Every branch is a pill.
Nothing connects to logic
and I communicate what?
I float inside my pain
like it means something.
If disease made sense,
when would doctors return
their white coats and handshakes?
I am swollen and the world
in my heart is what I want to cut off.
Something that keeps
the floating away. Stiffness collects
in my bones and becomes a house
with swollen windows. Images repeat
like they are supposed to.
Pain is printed
on the body. Every unorganized
spirit is the depth of never
falling into yourself without chaos.
God is a hand
that pulls the petals
from their bloom.
The world is undone
with spinning.
And words matter
when we begin.
If you suffer long enough,
you may be able to say something about it.
When you are dying,
You become practical.
A face exposed to injury
is more ostracized than broken.
A wearing down of organs
turning an illness inside out.
My belly blooms with bacteria.
I am trying to decide
if my illness lives
on my face. All those bloated
balloons can no longer stand
on the ceiling. How deflating keeps you
in-between places you’re not sure you want
to fall or rise towards.
We live in houses because we have to
escape the world somehow.
I am trying to sit on a memory
that is past my fingertips.
My youth carried into age
like you can fill boxes
with a way to start over.
I am always starting over
to get closer
to the parts Yesterday didn’t touch.
For every wing tipped with worry,
I am shaped less and less
into a moment I’m looking for.
My own shadow makes me feel
I’m the person I can become
if the light doesn’t shift.
Something crawls out of life
and makes a breath on my face
stand in my hair.
Beauty peeled back is just age.
My body knows weight
as does everyone’s.
I’d tell you my suffering,
but you’d have to live inside of it.
Otherwise, it’s someone else’s image
scraped into the body.
Every day I dress in oil
and slip into my skin.
I am something that stains
everything that I own.
My body dies from the inside
trying to get out.
The light is pink
before when the sky is
drowning. The end of the day
is not quite the end of light.
But, I am the owner
of a body that—
Wind shows the bellies
of leaves. Rain is the light
hand of falling. The air twists
inside me somewhere.
I cannot define the rain.
only what I know of it.
Like the clouds
when the sun only knows
fragments of reaching down
to touch the earth.
Night doesn’t know which day it lives.
something climbs up the wall,
but the light is stagnant.
It moves when you are the object.
A smile shreds the light
on my face.
My laughter stands
in the distance
And sounds like a cry.
Emotion grows a body
inside my own.
I need words
that tilt into nothing
I know how to say.
I see better through a blind spot.
When I am tired,
the screen door buzzes,
and all I am is tiny parts
emptying space.
If the world is the birth of a voice
we throw away with outside hands,
tomorrow will build a house inside
the future someone else will inhabit,
and God is the next room.
