I have abandoned the poem of my last post for the moment –
It’s still working it’s way through the cogs of my head, trying to find the right images (words will follow later, I hope). I’ve taken E’s advice, writing everything down that I can imagine, trying to figure out which images to string together, where my emotion is.
(By the by — does anyone know how to attach something physical to music? Because that’s the image I’m struggling with right now. Everything else has had actual physical equivalents, but music eludes me. I want to attach something to a song, so that everyone can see it, not just a copy that I own, like a CD.)
Instead of struggling with the most awesome awesomeness to come out of my imagination, I’ve started on a poem that is inspired by a single line: I wanted to write you a love poem.
This work is entirely different that what I usually write. To begin with, couplets. I don’t think I’ve ever actually written couplets, and it’s interesting to try to think about where the line breaks should be, and as I add and change lines throughout the poem, I have to be mindful of the couplet breaks.
The imagery is different than usual, too, since usually I attempt a single running metaphor (the universe, perhaps?), and this one switches up three times, but it makes sense because it’s more stream of thought than I usually attempt.
Think Billy Collins, really. I’ve been gorging on poetry between chapters of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins required for class, and his poetry moves me like nothing else, and there are no “love poems” so much that there are poems filled with love.
My poem is… I know I know, this would be so much easier if I could share the poem with you all, but I’m working on it for submission for the Sigma Tau Delta lit mag, and I don’t want to put it up here and have that count as prior publication and thus get excluded solely for that. But once it gets rejected, I promise to share it with you all.
But I’m really excited. It’s like my muse has decided this is the week she’s going to be awesome. This week, I heart poetry. And to show you, here’s one of my favorite Collin’s poems, animated. I think all poems should get the “music video” treatment.
I am not a poet.
Which makes it so odd, then, that so often there are poems that attempt to worm their way out of my head.
I have every poem I’ve ever written since I was 10. I started collecting them into a journal notebook when I was in the eighth grade. I started actually writing poetry in drafts when I was 23. I have never written anything that I would send out for publication.
It is very interesting to flip through that self-made poem book, and see how my poetry has evolved. I look back on those high school poems, so full of angst and anger and death, and can’t remember a single event that caused me to feel that way. They read a lot like the journal from my sophomore/junior year. Full of emotion, hardly any images. And so very much crap. Only the thought that I’d probably burn down the condo keeps me from burning this book.
My poetry now revolves around images. Scenes in my head that mean more than just the event. The hardest part is to get out the emotion behind the image. It’s like for some reason, my brain cannot process both into the same poem. It’s always either/or, never both.
I am very lucky that I have a wide group of friends who all write, or all understand the process of writing (but deny that they write), and are willing to listen while I hash out ideas and images and emotions. I’m never at a loss for finding someone available when I need to talk through my writing.1
Right now, there is a poem that needs to fall out onto the page. I’ve been thinking about it on and off for the last week. I have an image that’s been building. I know what the emotion is. I have absolutely no words to string together. ME and Am think it’s an absolutely brilliant idea. E tells me to write about it like I write stories — describing everything I see, and maybe the poem will come. I day dream about the poem while I’m in class, the image running through my head like a music video to a song with no lyrics.
I need to get these lyrics out. It’s a love song, both happy and sad. Hopeless and hopeful. Haunting and haunted. It’s pretty much going to be the best thing I’ve ever imagined.
But first I must get the damn image on the page without losing the emotion.
- Thank you! omfg thank you! I’d go crazy without you all! [back]
I fell asleep looking at this photo the other night. Danny, in addition to inspiring me when we talk, inspires me with his photography (can’t wait ’til I can afford to buy some of his prints).
So, I fell asleep thinking about birds, and flying. It was the title of the photo, though, that really got me to think.
How hard do you fly?
Since I was little, I always wanted to be able to fly. I used to stand in the back yard, arms straight up in the air, and imagine that I could fly around my neighborhood much like Superman. But as I’ve grown up, I imagine flying less and less, to where that imaginary memory doesn’t feel real like it used to.
It seems to me that as we grow and evolve, our imagination begins to take a back burner to our lives. While I never had an imaginary friend — I had a little sister that never left me alone, why would I need to make up a friend — I used to imagine lots of things that I used to think was absolutely normal and real.
Flying like superman, for one. I also used to imagine that I could walk on the ceiling, holding a mirror in front of me so that I could only see my new “ground.” I’d imagine that the tree in our front yard was really my home; I had branches that were designated to be my bed, others for the living room, and so on. I would pretend to be different people, different animals, different anything.
But somewhere along the line, I stopped playing make believe. I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but I remember one day standing in the backyard, arms straight up in the air, and I could no longer fly. Walking on the ceiling felt more like walking with a mirror in front of me. The tree became only a tree.
My imagination became internalized. I still imagined things, but it happened in the dark, when I was asleep, or when I was throwing words on paper to see what would stick. There was no physicality left to my imagination, there was no one else involved.
I wasn’t trying hard any more. I gave up on flying. It was easier to believe that flying wasn’t an important.
But it is! I’m not flying hard enough in my life. My imagination is the one thing that sets me off from other people, and I’m not using it to my fullest extent. As an adult, my imagination outlet is my writing, and I find ways to put that off, convince myself that I don’t know what to imagine anymore. Imagination takes work. Flying takes work.
I need to try to fly harder, to find that place within myself that allows me to stand in my backyard, arms upstretched, believing that I can fly. Because I can fly.
I just need to believe.
Saturday afternoon, I asked Danny an idle question1: do you ever think that we don’t get what we want because we want it too much?
Because of our history, Danny knew without my explaining it that I didn’t mean just about physical goods or outcomes, but emotional goals we’ve set for ourselves without realizing. He began to set out this theory of his that explains how he believes the universe works in these situations — when the want is a state of being, whether it be the want to be rich, or the want to be loved by millions.
what we want has to be a subconscious desire, a driving motivator behind what we do and say and think consciously. because we are not in complete control of what happens (ie. there are other humans involved each with their own free will), we have to forget that we’re trying to rig the system in our favor. sorta like quantum theory, how all possibilities are actually happening until you observe it from outside the box. because the universe is going to correct course, if you are aware that you are rigging the system.
Danny went on to give me a political example; I however was thinking on a more personal level, and about the way people interact.
For example, Jimmy really like Katie. Jimmy makes it really obvious that he likes Katie. He calls her, he sends her text messages and pokes her on Facebook and IM’s her in the middle of the night when he sees that she’s online. Jimmy consciously knows that he really likes Katie and wants her to like him back. However, by over thinking his actions, he in effect drives Katie away because whether or not she liked him before, she now feels that he is slightly creepy and way too involved for whatever she was ready for.
It is when Jimmy loses hope, when he drops off his interaction to her, when his like for her has dropped to the subconscious — he still likes her, but he doesn’t think about it any more because he’s sure that she doesn’t feel the same way — this is when Katie is going to come back and show that she likes him. As Danny says:
people who accidentally fall in love with each other are still looking for love, acceptance, relationships, but they’ve taken that from a conscious to subconscious level and when that happens they’re able to focus on the individuals, ignoring their fatal flaws and hyperbolizing their strengths
When what you want — or what you think you want — still dominates your conscience, everything becomes overanalyzed. Does he like me? Will he call? What is he thinking? Questions dominate, what you want seems too far out of reach and an impossible goal because the goal requires another person, with their own wants and desires, to acquiesce to yours. And everyone is selfish when it comes to what they want.
Pushing what you want to the subconscious is terribly hard. After all, it’s what you want, it’s what you think/dream/wish for. But it’s when you put it aside, focus your energy on something else, that what was once unreachable will be within your grasp.
And obviously this doesn’t work with everything. Some things to require you to work hard at it. But others are much better achieved by knowing you want it, but allowing the universe to work itself out in unknown ways. It’s like getting a present you’ve always wanted but never having to tell anyone explicitly to give it to you.
- idle in that we were talking about random things when I brought it up. Danny and I have a history of philosophical discussions about life, love, and the universe. He is, in fact, my go-to guy for discussions that are about more than what they seem [back]
