To start writing anything, I tell myself that no one will read it. That way, I can say what I need to say without feeling inhibited. The challenge with this mentality when it comes to creating a portfolio, is knowing that someone will read its contents for the purpose of evaluating its worthiness, to pick it apart—or glance over it and toss it out—makes me keenly aware of myself, and my words as a reflection of that self—not as a mirror image, but as an outward manifestation of my attempt to arrive at an inner truth.
I see poetry is an honorable lie, taken on with a naïve sort of wisdom. The struggle becomes one inside the mind of the author, and is worked out malleably through the journey of the poem: the journey of the author in discovering the words and hearing them, happening upon them as if they have always been there, waiting silently to be heard. There is also the journey of any presumed reader, as they navigate the text and interact with it. The words themselves are on a journey; only, they are not so destination oriented, even if they are sometimes grounded by physical or geographical setting. Words are nomadic in nature. They pause and settle briefly on the buds of my synapses, only to immediately thereafter be transmitted over illegal broadcasts stationed in mare liberum. My job, as the author, is to tune in, and try to catch what I can, before the words are off again, without a chaperone.
For all their flightiness, words hold certain permanence in our society: in the words of the title character of V for Vendetta, “words always retain their power. Words are the means to meaning, and for some, the annunciation of truth.” The “meaning” of words, however, maintains a flexible workability to be re-appropriated in definition, tense, and implication. Of course, one could say that words, on a page, or saved on a hard drive that commits clicking suicide, lack permanence: we can burn books, and computers, are computers. Perhaps then, the sense of longevity comes down to letters, even as they have evolved in physicality and sound. Symbols to represent sound existed before we developed the intellect to harness and manifest them physically by writing or carving them out, in so many variations as there are written languages, and people to pronounce them differently; with that, we each know the sounds (and, by extension, the syllables and words they comprise) differently. Perspective is the stuff of existence: what makes each of us our own being, but that we are all beings of one being, at the risk of straying to the metaphysical. It begs the question of whether sound directly affects our understanding of words, not merely in terms of inflection and stresses, but at the more elemental level of individual sounds. If we grow up deaf, we understand language more manually: learning to make sounds that we cannot hear, by observing and learning muscle movements. It is not to say that we understand words any less if we do not hear them, but that we interact with them differently on a fundamental level: to not hear the words coming out of our own mouths, but rather to know words in terms of their tactility, how they move mechanically through our mouth. When sounds are on a page to be read as letters, it allows words a layered texture: an amplification when spoken, and a more subtle understanding when they lie quietly confined to ink lines on the page.
For a time, I separated oral and written poetry in my mind. There were certain poems that I would perform at an open-mic that I never would have brought into an academic workshop. I didn’t see one as greater than the other, but I did see them as apart from one another. In terms of content and style, I was more willing to be abrasive when performing in front of an audience, where my poem would be taken as an overall experience, than I was in a classroom, where I knew it would be “put on the chopping block”. On the other side of it, I would write poems that didn’t flow as well out-loud, and I saw those as best kept silent on the page. I shared this with a creative writing Professor at UMD, who made the suggestion, that I try to do both: to write something that spans a bridge between the two spheres in my mind, so that it would carry the same weight on the page as it did off. At first, I didn’t see how I could reconcile the differences between my two main audiences, the colloquial and the academic. I became very frustrated with my writing; I felt like I had lost the ability to produce something original, something that would garner a reaction, and, ultimately, that I would be proud to call my own. I had arrived at the root of my problem: I needed to stop writing for other people, and return to writing for myself, as I had as a child, as pure creative expression without motive. I began to see writing as a meditation of sorts: once I found a first line, I would try to keep writing, without thinking about what I was going to say next, lilting the flow, uninhibitedly.
I have developed a fascination for sound, and how it determines words. When I am writing, and I come to a point where I am stuck, but the poem is not finished, I shut-up and listen for it: what sound or syllable should come after last word, or letter? What is a word that starts with the sound I am hearing? Sound allows me to drive the poem forward, it forces me to find thoughts and ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Often when I return to a poem, to read back what I have just written, I surprise myself, as if I have stumbled upon some form of truth.
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