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An Introduction:

    There is a voice that I prefer the most. A casual, conversational voice that may even border on being rough which provides me with the most sincere means to saying what I want to say. Poetry gives me the time to organize that voice into something polished, something with clear intent. With poetry, I get a shot to take a reader’s attention and fill it with whatever I want without being interrupted. The threat of interruption here is all self inflicted, coming from the excessive stuttering, shaking or general uncomfortable feeling that comes with talking normally about many of the ideas or stories I play with in my poems. When I talk, I can get ahead of myself, trip over words and lose my train of thought and all of this can be observed by whoever I am speaking to, but when I turn out a poem the reader sees none of that unless I want them too. I can have a close conversation with the reader without all of the anxiety of conversational performance, and this is great to me. It is therapeutic. 

    This idea of conversation is really important to me in my poetry. If a poem is really conversational, it is accessible and it wants to cooperate with the reader. It is not messing with the reader or playing mind games or any other form of alienation. Instead the poem is welcoming the reader in, asking them to relate and trying to sympathize with the reader. It is a great careless feeling to have the exact same experiences as someone else but in completely different times and places; to be talking to a stranger about a situation so different from your own but exactly the same. This relationship is what draws me to poetry, that connection with someone you don’t even know through an experience you have. The point is not usually a greater truth or a political statement for me, just a form of discharging overpowering memories in a way that someone else can also connect to. I am a little disappointed about this, but I would probably be bunched with the confessional poets rather than the noble political poets or the eclectic experimental poets. And I use the term poet here very tentatively. 

    Although most of my poems are in response to memories of mine, there is something else I frequently react to: images. If I am going to break away from reality I will jump into the most fantastical, absurd imagery that I can. For this reason, Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most prominent animation directors of Japan, is one of my biggest sources for visually motivated poetry. I found his art especially supportive for my poem responding to Roberto Harrison’s book, Counter Daemons. Harrison’s poem construction created very surreal images of impossible beasts in my mind when I read through them and so when I wanted to respond to that sort of effect I thought of Miyazaki for inspiration. Miyazaki’s characters and images leave the watcher wanting more, and writing a poem about one of them was my way of letting me see more than he originally gave me, which is a pretty awesome idea. 

    At the start of the term I was looking forward to becoming more comfortable with writing and putting my ideas out in the open. I have liked to write since elementary school but never really developed the confidence to feel comfortable putting sincere effort into writing or sharing my writing with anyone.  Being over-conscious of my audience is the biggest difficulty to me. When I tried to write the first poem for the course I just sat there thinking “What does the professor expect? Am I allowed to write about this? Is the professor going to look at my paper, sigh and hand it back to me?”  I couldn’t write anything. I couldn’t get myself to pick a subject and say: “yes, it is okay to write about this. Now do it.”  As the term went on, this feeling started to fall away although I noticed that on the weeks where I was especially overworked I reverted back to this impossible mindset.  Just making myself put something out for someone to see every week, no matter how complete the pieces were, got me past some of these blocks.  This class got me to put aside all of my completely arbitrary concerns and just focus on making something.    Both feedback from the discussion sessions and exposure to what other students did with the same assignment as me gave me a lot to think about.  The extra pressure of knowing that the class would be talking about a couple of my poems really drove me to trying hard enough on my work so that I could be content with fifteen other people scrutinizing what I gave them.  You learn a lot by listening to other people talk about your poems. It is all too easy to get stuck in your own head while writing so hearing how other people understand what you have written gives you a really fresh look.  You can tell right away whether you are being too obvious or utterly incomprehensible, which is always good to know.  By reading the responses the other students had to the same assignments as me I realized how many different ways you can work with an assignment that you have been given. There were countless times this term that my poetry-writing-world was expanded as I saw other writers doing something in their work that I didn’t even think was possible or allowed.  I don’t know why I have this mindset, but I seem to think that there are trillions and trillions of rules saying what you can and cannot do in your work. So the exposure I got to what everyone else was doing opened my eyes to a hold plethora of ways that I could be writing and all of the cool ways I can manipulate even one word; once you bold a word and set it to font size fifty two, the word has a completely different impact than it did when it was in plain old size twelve font.

    Experimentation is a process I learned to like as the term went on.  Instead of sitting around and worrying about how something will turn out, now, I’d rather mess around with and play with it to see where it goes.  Doing poetry in this way has turned into a de-stressor for me, while writing used to be really stressful.  Formal poetry used to terrify me because if I felt that if you didn’t stick to the rules, what you wrote didn’t count.  But after seeing what Ted Berrigan can get away with in his sonnet collection, I realized that a lot of the fun of formal poetry is in breaking or clashing with the form. Pantoums and sonnets and other formal writing can get really stiff but when you break the form you can keep what you like about the form and make the rest into whatever you want.  This gives a really cool effect, a conflict between where you do and do not follow the form and why.  Breaking formal poetry can give an extra layer of meaning to your poem or help strengthen what the content was enunciating.  In this collection, I have a sonnet is an example of this.  For my sonnet I chose to just work with having the ten syllables in each of my fourteen lines.  The rhyme of the formal sonnet wouldn’t have worked well with what I was writing about, so I ignored rhyming. I even ended up breaking the ten syllable count in the last line of the sonnet.  Essentially what I did is I wrote down a scene that I remembered, made it fit into the ten syllable count, not caring about whether or not the lines were enjambed.  The disagreement between the form and the content ended up strengthening what my poem was trying to declare.  The lines were boxed in and ended up spilling over the restraints of the sonnet form, which was exactly the sensation I was hoping my poem would say.

    The first poem in this collection is another example of me experimenting with what I can do with poetry.  Here, I was trying to push all the way beyond what I might have thought poetry was at the start of the term until I stopped worrying about whether or not what I wrote was poetry and instead just started to have fun with it.  Why shouldn’t I be able to try to convince people that they might indeed be fish through absurd and unrelated details?  This class has shown me how to allow myself to have fun while writing poetry instead of beating myself up about it.  My understanding of poetry has changed. Now, not only do I want my poetry to work with and talk to my readers (when I am lucky enough to have any, not that I need them) but I want to have fun with my work. I want to play with it. I want to break forms when I want to and I want to be a little ridiculous about it. Rather than just being therapeutic because I can be confessional, poetry is therapeutic because it has become enjoyable to me.