This is another first draft of a poem, I haven't messed with it yet, I thought I'd post it in its raw form and see what people thought (plus I've been kind of busy and lazy lately to actually give it the thoughtful revision it really needs). The first two parts, with "the water falls" and "standing underneath...," are the only parts I'm a little shaky on, but the form of the whole thing needs a look over. Right now it's in a convenient form, so if it works then let me know, but if not then I'll give it some more thought.
I've wanted to write a shower poem for the longest time, since high school. The idea I wanted to address just kept changing. In high school I wanted to write some sort of story that gave across the idea that, no matter what our differences are, we all shower (even sounds like a high school idea). Then in freshman year I wanted to focus on the solitude of the shower, and I might try that too sometime. This year, a few weeks ago, I was thinking about how soothing showers are, how sometimes it really feels like they're washing everything away. The image came in my head as washing of all the dirt, but then I wondered if that dirt was necessary somehow, if maybe that's what actually made us all different, how we accumulate it. From there I wrote this, mostly in a blind spur, hence why the parentheses in that second part might seem weird. Let me know how it is, I'm really glad people are starting to leave me critiques!
In side/personal news, I applied to the Advanced Poetry Workshop here at NYU, won't know if I'm in until November 13th - the anticipation! I didn't take the Intermediate Poetry Workshop, so I really applied to it blind, but here's hoping for the best.
So leave comments and criticisms please, they're all appreciated, the good along with the bad.
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Washing Pains Away
by Matthew Stalbaum
The water falls
the water falls…
…
…
and burns….
Standing underneath the soft rains
I’d wash it all off, the clothes (unweave the
Stitching from my skin and fingers, tear the
Patches from my knees), the dirt (it has
Come to shape my chin and my elbows and
My laugh), the dust (shed it like snake skin or
time), Skin (I grow cold, I grow cold),
Muscles (I did not fight, I did not stand, I
Only sat upon my hands), and the clean
White bones of me all (don’t all skeletons
Look alike, or do closer eyes find cracks) and
I will swirl down the drains and expect a
Ghost to stand where I was, but there will
Only be a breath, then a cough, then
Nothing but nothingness and nothingdom,
Not even loss or lament, and
I will wait for the bones to grow back and
The muscles and skin to grow back and
The dust to gather and the dirt to clod and
The clothes to crawl on like fur and
I will see how dirty I am to be something
And desire for cleanliness and purity and
Nothingness and nothingdom.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Staring into Subway Tunnels (A Poem)
This is one of my weirder ones in terms of content. I thought it up a week or so ago, while leaving a subway station and walking by the edge of the platform. It's the kind of poem where the words just jumped out of nowhere, and sometimes I just let them lay there because I know it's just my mind being annoying and other times more words come, and this was a case where more words came. Of course I didn't write the poem down immediately, so I had to get those first 2 lines down and remember what the image and tone of the rest of the thing was supposed to be, and it's definitely not a perfect poem, not something I'd ship off to the New Yorker or anything, but I kinda like it. As always, please leave some criticism; since this isn't something like love where you immediately know how you should start feeling about it, maybe let me know what you do feel or what you think it means? Hell, I'm not even sure of that myself, but it'll be a fun game...or not, the fact that you read it is nice enough.
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Staring into Subway Tunnels
by Matthew Stalbaum
Staring deep into the cavernous
Mouth of the subway, I feel
The weight of an entire city of
Abysmal darkness sitting stale
In the air, as the beast roars
Through the unbreakable blackness
And the stars of its eyes glisten
Madly as suns of dead-beat fathers
On a drunk, and the ground shakes
But falls still, and somewhere in its
Caves the monster lays and moves
Only softly, only softly, so quietly,
And I feel lonely again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Staring into Subway Tunnels
by Matthew Stalbaum
Staring deep into the cavernous
Mouth of the subway, I feel
The weight of an entire city of
Abysmal darkness sitting stale
In the air, as the beast roars
Through the unbreakable blackness
And the stars of its eyes glisten
Madly as suns of dead-beat fathers
On a drunk, and the ground shakes
But falls still, and somewhere in its
Caves the monster lays and moves
Only softly, only softly, so quietly,
And I feel lonely again.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
I Have Loved You (A Poem)
The other day I stumbled upon Pablo Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines," and rereading this just now, I realized how much I copied Neruda, but I didn't mean to! I think my last stanza is different from the feel of his poem though, and that was the original intention of the poem, only I tried starting from there and realized that there wasn't anywhere to go - I was describing a period after a relationship without the relationship. Neruda's is more about loss I think, while I wanted to illustrate the lingering of things. I finally got the idea to start where I did last week I believe, and I wrote it in a night and am presenting it for you here and now! It's a pretty straight forward poem I think, but I like it anyways. Maybe in the future I'll tweak the punctuation and capitalization, because I really do like e.e. cummings style of practically never capitalizing things - then again, I still need to tweak my style altogether and find a voice that isn't just copying him!
Writing's been scarce lately, I'm wrapped up in devouring as many TV series/seasons and movies as I can, but poetry ideas have been had, so hopefully I can post those more frequently than I have been and not solely write rambles, although I have a fair number of those lined up for writing as well. Either way, I should be able to get 1 or 2 postings a week, to all of you, my millions of adoring fans. Hope you enjoy the poem, leave comments and criticisms on the way out!
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I have loved you
by Matthew Stalbaum
I have loved you, and
It was sweet, the taste of
Content days, knowing
Your skin to run so smoothly
Along my warm breath, how
I could have savored a bit longer for just a bit just a bit
I watched you go and willed back time
But all for not and none and nothing,
Until the day grew darker without you,
Seeing nothing and none and not anymore and
I watched you go and…
I have loved you, yes, and
That has been enough, to have
Known a life with you as each day
Was and is forever somewhere
I would love more, I would love longer
But my chariot won’t bring your flame back
I have loved you, and
Now I cannot unlove you,
Never, impossibly to not
Know you, to not knew you,
Each day grows lighter, and someday,
Maybe, perhaps,
I won’t think of you. But
You’ll be in all these glances,
All these letters and breaths and
Coughs and gestures and laughs and runs and tears and
All the new loves and
Etched into the old ones too
(memory’s a lovely gal) and
I have loved you, how
The world is a stranger, newer place,
This sun not quite so sunnish as I knew,
This sigh not quite so shallow as it was,
This light not quite so colored as I saw,
This life not quite so you, post-you, in
The quake of you, defined by you in
The bare bones and beams of it all,
You…
Writing's been scarce lately, I'm wrapped up in devouring as many TV series/seasons and movies as I can, but poetry ideas have been had, so hopefully I can post those more frequently than I have been and not solely write rambles, although I have a fair number of those lined up for writing as well. Either way, I should be able to get 1 or 2 postings a week, to all of you, my millions of adoring fans. Hope you enjoy the poem, leave comments and criticisms on the way out!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have loved you
by Matthew Stalbaum
I have loved you, and
It was sweet, the taste of
Content days, knowing
Your skin to run so smoothly
Along my warm breath, how
I could have savored a bit longer for just a bit just a bit
I watched you go and willed back time
But all for not and none and nothing,
Until the day grew darker without you,
Seeing nothing and none and not anymore and
I watched you go and…
I have loved you, yes, and
That has been enough, to have
Known a life with you as each day
Was and is forever somewhere
I would love more, I would love longer
But my chariot won’t bring your flame back
I have loved you, and
Now I cannot unlove you,
Never, impossibly to not
Know you, to not knew you,
Each day grows lighter, and someday,
Maybe, perhaps,
I won’t think of you. But
You’ll be in all these glances,
All these letters and breaths and
Coughs and gestures and laughs and runs and tears and
All the new loves and
Etched into the old ones too
(memory’s a lovely gal) and
I have loved you, how
The world is a stranger, newer place,
This sun not quite so sunnish as I knew,
This sigh not quite so shallow as it was,
This light not quite so colored as I saw,
This life not quite so you, post-you, in
The quake of you, defined by you in
The bare bones and beams of it all,
You…
Monday, October 5, 2009
To Write Women as a Man? To Write People as a Human?
Neil Gaiman has an essay on one of his particular views in storytelling. He believes that every story has a gender - sometimes a story is a boy, sometimes a story is a girl, and it's nothing you consciously set out for when starting a story, it just is. You think of an idea, some bare and interesting jumping point, and painted along the background walls and sifting through the air is that simple fact, "this one's a girl," or, "it feels like a boy."
I agree with this to an extent, but it could be argued (after I explain myself a bit) that I'm proof of his theory and am just not acknowledging it right out. My story-writing has two eras: the middle of high school (10th & 11th grade I'd say), and the middle of college so far (sophomore and junior years). In between was a gulf of silence that has its own reasons (mostly fear and intimidation) and aren't important right now, but my writing for these two periods is distinctly different, and my mindset towards writing is different. I could describe a large variety of these differences, but the one I find the most interesting is my view towards gender.
In high school I was terrified of writing the opposite gender. For me they were foils to my male characters, only because I didn't know the female mind! I had one story with a first person, female narrator, but she was a girl only so she could have feelings for the real main character, who was a boy (and who shared more than a fair number of traits with me - can you say fan fic?). But I was young, girls were still an elusive figure for me, not just a gender but a culture apart it seemed, with their own language and customs and body language that I just didn't understand. I even read Anna Karenina with a sense of awe, that this novelist could write for a woman character so wonderfully! I wondered endlessly if women readers felt connected with her, or if they felt the alienness of the male writer in her figure. It was all an enigma.
Then my second and current period of writing began, and the first story I tackled was a 30-something year old female phony-psychic with a son. The idea came during that time between periods, when my mind kept thinking and evolving in terms of writing, though no writing was being done except in journals and blogs on facebook and myspace. And as I wrote it, it never occurred to me, "oh, this is a woman, what should she do?" Her name was Marie, and that's how I always saw her - she did not have "woman's" issues, she had "Marie" issues, being a mother, running a business, dealing with clients (sometimes threatening ones), parent-teacher conferences. Only after I wrote it did the topic of conversation come up of what one typically writes - one side of the argument is that you write what you know, but my story was a clear point of the opposite, and I could explain my compulsion to write it by the fact that her story was interesting and something I felt needed to be told. But I never saw her as a "female" character, she was just a character.
It's occurred to me, though, that this is perhaps a neglectful stance though. I've recently written a story about a young woman who is dumped by her boyfriend and is getting over it, while the seeds for a new relationship are being planted, but she still has to deal with loneliness. I want the story to be about loneliness, the fact that it's a woman never even occurred to me until a day or so into writing it. I realized suddenly that I could be giving the impression that a woman can't be happy unless she's in a relationship. I tried to take measures into avoiding this kind of reading, but they're a bit tacked on and need to be integrated more deeply I feel.
It struck me, though, how I had to take this into consideration. Her name is "Claire," and I wasn't just writing Claire's story anymore, I was writing this "woman's" story, which is to say (because that sounds negative) that suddenly her being a woman made a huge difference into how the events could be taken and interpreted. She wasn't just lonely person, she was a single woman who needed a man - or so I felt it could have been seen, which wasn't right. Had it been a man, no one would have cared - in fact, it probably would've been critiqued along the more general terms of love, but the portrayal of men in terms of relationships wouldn't be analyzed very closely.
I realized that there's an issue with writing women, something I don't normally think about. It's an interesting argument: should one write a woman as a woman, and take advantage the social history of women in order to say something about gender, or should one simply write people, character, and leave gender to the biologists and sociologists? I would write character, but then there are opportunities being missed, messages that won't be taken into consideration. At the same time, I don't want to consciously have to think with every female character I write, "well, how's this one gonna be strong," because there are weak female figures, just as there are weak male figures - should I balance them by writing a weak man for every weak woman? There's far too much thought for this!
It's a matter of doing justice to women, to female characters. Personally, I would rather not think of things so categorized in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and the blur of those definitions, unless that is specifically what I'm going for. I have a story starring two lesbian lovers being intimate and one of them reads from Paradise Lost - you can bet I thought about sexuality when coming up for that idea (it has it's particular issues that need to be worked out and possibly rewritten). But I believe there is a case when a woman isn't a woman and a man isn't a man. For me, the most interesting characters are one's defined solely by their name, their identity as people. Though he only dates women, there's an androgyny to the appearance of Morpheus from the Sandman graphic novel series, and though he's mostly compared to Neil Gaiman, I'm reminded of David Bowie's alter-ego of Ziggy Stardust, whose called "Lady Stardust" in one of the album's songs of the same name. It doesn't matter that he dates women though - it is that he loves that the depth of his sorrow comes from. I love women and I adore the female figure, but I'd paint angrogynous characters from here on out for all my non-sexuality related stories if it would keep gender issues from rearing their ugly heads!
What I lament most is that I even had to consider writing women as an issue - wouldn't it be a dream if the notion of social and personal implications on writing a female character as opposed to a male one didn't exist? No uselessly submissive women, no propaganda-ly clad dominant men. But we'll leave those dreams aside; history's been tainted, and I don't think we can ever go back to that primordial innocence I think we once had, when there was humanity and that was enough.
I cannot entirely neglect gender in my writing. My mind hops and skips and jumps in its directions - ask me what genre I'd like to write for and I'll laugh and tell you, "Bradbury and Gaiman with a little bit of Vonnegut, Whitman, and some Mary Shelley." And that won't even cover it. Sexuality is a compelling thing to think about. But as I've written about before, what truly intriguies me is life, in all its gritty beauty, in all its simple contradictions. I like poetry because I can even forgo humanity and focus solely on a feeling, a thought, some truth (whatever that entails), maybe even just a color. But gender will come up. I only wish that I didn't have to clarify my innocent themes with details that steer interpretation away from a solely gender-reliant reading. It is alright to write strong-female characters, to write deep and interesting female characters, I do so myself from time to time. But isn't it still possible to write a strong character, a name that opens into a far-branching tree of the most intricate idiosyncracies? I guess the real question is, is it possible? Will Claire always be a woman, or can she simply be Claire? For me, there is a choice, and I will make it freely and unforgivingly. This story's a girl, this one feels like a boy, but this one...this one's a song, this one's a thought, and this one's a cool breeze against a bare shoulder on a hot day.
I agree with this to an extent, but it could be argued (after I explain myself a bit) that I'm proof of his theory and am just not acknowledging it right out. My story-writing has two eras: the middle of high school (10th & 11th grade I'd say), and the middle of college so far (sophomore and junior years). In between was a gulf of silence that has its own reasons (mostly fear and intimidation) and aren't important right now, but my writing for these two periods is distinctly different, and my mindset towards writing is different. I could describe a large variety of these differences, but the one I find the most interesting is my view towards gender.
In high school I was terrified of writing the opposite gender. For me they were foils to my male characters, only because I didn't know the female mind! I had one story with a first person, female narrator, but she was a girl only so she could have feelings for the real main character, who was a boy (and who shared more than a fair number of traits with me - can you say fan fic?). But I was young, girls were still an elusive figure for me, not just a gender but a culture apart it seemed, with their own language and customs and body language that I just didn't understand. I even read Anna Karenina with a sense of awe, that this novelist could write for a woman character so wonderfully! I wondered endlessly if women readers felt connected with her, or if they felt the alienness of the male writer in her figure. It was all an enigma.
Then my second and current period of writing began, and the first story I tackled was a 30-something year old female phony-psychic with a son. The idea came during that time between periods, when my mind kept thinking and evolving in terms of writing, though no writing was being done except in journals and blogs on facebook and myspace. And as I wrote it, it never occurred to me, "oh, this is a woman, what should she do?" Her name was Marie, and that's how I always saw her - she did not have "woman's" issues, she had "Marie" issues, being a mother, running a business, dealing with clients (sometimes threatening ones), parent-teacher conferences. Only after I wrote it did the topic of conversation come up of what one typically writes - one side of the argument is that you write what you know, but my story was a clear point of the opposite, and I could explain my compulsion to write it by the fact that her story was interesting and something I felt needed to be told. But I never saw her as a "female" character, she was just a character.
It's occurred to me, though, that this is perhaps a neglectful stance though. I've recently written a story about a young woman who is dumped by her boyfriend and is getting over it, while the seeds for a new relationship are being planted, but she still has to deal with loneliness. I want the story to be about loneliness, the fact that it's a woman never even occurred to me until a day or so into writing it. I realized suddenly that I could be giving the impression that a woman can't be happy unless she's in a relationship. I tried to take measures into avoiding this kind of reading, but they're a bit tacked on and need to be integrated more deeply I feel.
It struck me, though, how I had to take this into consideration. Her name is "Claire," and I wasn't just writing Claire's story anymore, I was writing this "woman's" story, which is to say (because that sounds negative) that suddenly her being a woman made a huge difference into how the events could be taken and interpreted. She wasn't just lonely person, she was a single woman who needed a man - or so I felt it could have been seen, which wasn't right. Had it been a man, no one would have cared - in fact, it probably would've been critiqued along the more general terms of love, but the portrayal of men in terms of relationships wouldn't be analyzed very closely.
I realized that there's an issue with writing women, something I don't normally think about. It's an interesting argument: should one write a woman as a woman, and take advantage the social history of women in order to say something about gender, or should one simply write people, character, and leave gender to the biologists and sociologists? I would write character, but then there are opportunities being missed, messages that won't be taken into consideration. At the same time, I don't want to consciously have to think with every female character I write, "well, how's this one gonna be strong," because there are weak female figures, just as there are weak male figures - should I balance them by writing a weak man for every weak woman? There's far too much thought for this!
It's a matter of doing justice to women, to female characters. Personally, I would rather not think of things so categorized in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and the blur of those definitions, unless that is specifically what I'm going for. I have a story starring two lesbian lovers being intimate and one of them reads from Paradise Lost - you can bet I thought about sexuality when coming up for that idea (it has it's particular issues that need to be worked out and possibly rewritten). But I believe there is a case when a woman isn't a woman and a man isn't a man. For me, the most interesting characters are one's defined solely by their name, their identity as people. Though he only dates women, there's an androgyny to the appearance of Morpheus from the Sandman graphic novel series, and though he's mostly compared to Neil Gaiman, I'm reminded of David Bowie's alter-ego of Ziggy Stardust, whose called "Lady Stardust" in one of the album's songs of the same name. It doesn't matter that he dates women though - it is that he loves that the depth of his sorrow comes from. I love women and I adore the female figure, but I'd paint angrogynous characters from here on out for all my non-sexuality related stories if it would keep gender issues from rearing their ugly heads!
What I lament most is that I even had to consider writing women as an issue - wouldn't it be a dream if the notion of social and personal implications on writing a female character as opposed to a male one didn't exist? No uselessly submissive women, no propaganda-ly clad dominant men. But we'll leave those dreams aside; history's been tainted, and I don't think we can ever go back to that primordial innocence I think we once had, when there was humanity and that was enough.
I cannot entirely neglect gender in my writing. My mind hops and skips and jumps in its directions - ask me what genre I'd like to write for and I'll laugh and tell you, "Bradbury and Gaiman with a little bit of Vonnegut, Whitman, and some Mary Shelley." And that won't even cover it. Sexuality is a compelling thing to think about. But as I've written about before, what truly intriguies me is life, in all its gritty beauty, in all its simple contradictions. I like poetry because I can even forgo humanity and focus solely on a feeling, a thought, some truth (whatever that entails), maybe even just a color. But gender will come up. I only wish that I didn't have to clarify my innocent themes with details that steer interpretation away from a solely gender-reliant reading. It is alright to write strong-female characters, to write deep and interesting female characters, I do so myself from time to time. But isn't it still possible to write a strong character, a name that opens into a far-branching tree of the most intricate idiosyncracies? I guess the real question is, is it possible? Will Claire always be a woman, or can she simply be Claire? For me, there is a choice, and I will make it freely and unforgivingly. This story's a girl, this one feels like a boy, but this one...this one's a song, this one's a thought, and this one's a cool breeze against a bare shoulder on a hot day.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Art & Life
I've written about poetry having the potential for abstraction in its free form structure to describe something of the essence of life, how words need not line up in order to evoke an idea or emotion - how rhyme can restrict, while free verse can get at the intangible and place it in the very form and structure of a poem. I didn't mention any other styles of artistic expression though, which was a mistake.
Today I read Making Comics by Scott McCloud; it is his 3rd book on comics as an art form, with the 1st one being perhaps the most popular and well-known, Understanding Comics. I bring it up because lately I've been having what I call a "Kiki-dilemma," the name being stolen from the title character of Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service. At one point in the movie she begins to lose her powers because she has no real motivation or inspiration to even use them. Her main ability is flying, but she sees it only as a means of traveling and getting business. With writing these days, though I've still had the ability to get words on the paper in my typical fashion, there wasn't much heart behind it all. It didn't exhilirate me like it used to, and I began to grow worried about what would happen if I lost the will to write. I still wrote, but mostly out of an obligation to myself.
Reading Making Comics reminded me a lot about the beauty I see in art, and the potential in it that I want to take advantage, that I believe should be taken advantage of. Going through the various styles of comics and what's been done with them, I realized part of the reason why I enjoy them so much...or rather, I was reminded of that reason. It's because of the nature of drawing in itself, a sort of abstraction from reality. He discusses it much more in Understanding Comics, how on one end of the spectrum you have reality, and on the other you have absolute abstraction, which is language or text, because the image used to represent a concept no longer even looks like the concept. A drawing of a tree is an image of that tree, and it can grow more and more abstract in its depiction but nothing more so than actual just writing "tree."
I enjoy this part of drawing because it made me think about art again. I'm always at war with myself (about everything really), and with art, for me, that constant question has always been whether I want to approach realism or some form of abstraction, even if it's so minor as to simply be magical realism. In short, do I want to describe the actual world we live in, or do I want to look beyond it, at the way each and every one of us individually conceives of it, with our various histories and beliefs and ideologies. On the one hand, I am a strong advocate of the idea that even the simplest, most common place feature of life has some beauty, and if an artist can see it then he can bring it out and show others. In this sense, life should be taken as it is, as our normal conception of perception (sorry for the strange repetition there) interacts with things. In drawing, this would involve sitting in front of a tree and drawing it, molecule by molecule (not so extreme but you get the idea). On the other hand, I don't believe life is so simple as what we see on the surface. Teeming behind our eyes are a million thoughts, dreams, ideas, hopes, fears, and what have you, not to mention countless seconds spent having all of these things! A tree is not exactly a tree - a tree is senior year in a park, cuddled with a girlfriend, or stories of my cousin climbing one and breaking his arm. A tree does not merely rustle, it sings, and each leaf falling off tinkles like Christmas bells, or stands with its roots in the very blood of history, rooted fiercely, desperately. You see, a tree can be anything that you feel it is, and abstraction in art allows for that - free verse poetry, abstract drawing, even free form and experimental music (in music my tastes are more grounded but I won't rule out something abstract in any form).
The beauty of art is that it can capture so much of life no matter how you tell it. I can draw a hand, and sketch the thinest details into it, every single wrinkle produced from thousands of days of work. Or I can draw just an outline, perhaps not even a hand, perhaps a claw, or the tiniest little fingers. Conveying life: that is what I want to do! McCloud even has a category for such desires in an artist: iconoclast. Because life, even at its darkest, has something heavenly about it. As I like to say, even a tragedy is beautiful. Our very existence is miraculous! And here we are, everyday interacting with this world, never once thinking about the brush of a shoulder or the hundredth time we've walked into a particular building. I try to, at least once every time I ride the bus to and from school, look out the window as we're passing by an avenue, and watch it stretch out, see the buildings in the distance stand so majestically. I'm mesmorized by clouds, dazzled by pidgeons. There is a silence to life, underlying everything, and I'd like to sing it.
Life can never be fully conveyed, of course. Hell, I even wrote a poem about that very idea! But then, life can never be fully understood either - one always learns, always. I take my lessons with interest and a smile, but I've learned the most through friendships, through experience, through taking moments to look at the ocean and sigh. The main purpose of art, at its deepest core, is expression of...something. An idea, an emotion, an idealogy, anything that needs to be expressed. I see it as an opportunity - what can I express to you that you haven't thought of before? They say we're telling the same stories over and over again, fine, but how can the way I tell it affect you? I'll necessarily add perhaps a tinge of despair to a sunny day, some rain to your smile, my entire middle school experience to a discussion of post-colonial literature, and what will you feel then? I think the thing that us high-aspiration type artists strive for is simply showing you an image, a life, a place, a thing that you haven't thought about before, even if it's just a change in perspective. What did Hamlet look like to Ophelia? Ah, a much different story comes about! The artist says, "hey, life is out there, have you seen it? I'm sure you have, but have you seen what I've seen?" And every once in a while, you read something or see something or hear something, some piece of artistic expression, and you open your eyes and your heart swells up, and whisper an "ah" of discovery. I live for those moments, and I only hope to give them to someone else someday...
Today I read Making Comics by Scott McCloud; it is his 3rd book on comics as an art form, with the 1st one being perhaps the most popular and well-known, Understanding Comics. I bring it up because lately I've been having what I call a "Kiki-dilemma," the name being stolen from the title character of Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service. At one point in the movie she begins to lose her powers because she has no real motivation or inspiration to even use them. Her main ability is flying, but she sees it only as a means of traveling and getting business. With writing these days, though I've still had the ability to get words on the paper in my typical fashion, there wasn't much heart behind it all. It didn't exhilirate me like it used to, and I began to grow worried about what would happen if I lost the will to write. I still wrote, but mostly out of an obligation to myself.
Reading Making Comics reminded me a lot about the beauty I see in art, and the potential in it that I want to take advantage, that I believe should be taken advantage of. Going through the various styles of comics and what's been done with them, I realized part of the reason why I enjoy them so much...or rather, I was reminded of that reason. It's because of the nature of drawing in itself, a sort of abstraction from reality. He discusses it much more in Understanding Comics, how on one end of the spectrum you have reality, and on the other you have absolute abstraction, which is language or text, because the image used to represent a concept no longer even looks like the concept. A drawing of a tree is an image of that tree, and it can grow more and more abstract in its depiction but nothing more so than actual just writing "tree."
I enjoy this part of drawing because it made me think about art again. I'm always at war with myself (about everything really), and with art, for me, that constant question has always been whether I want to approach realism or some form of abstraction, even if it's so minor as to simply be magical realism. In short, do I want to describe the actual world we live in, or do I want to look beyond it, at the way each and every one of us individually conceives of it, with our various histories and beliefs and ideologies. On the one hand, I am a strong advocate of the idea that even the simplest, most common place feature of life has some beauty, and if an artist can see it then he can bring it out and show others. In this sense, life should be taken as it is, as our normal conception of perception (sorry for the strange repetition there) interacts with things. In drawing, this would involve sitting in front of a tree and drawing it, molecule by molecule (not so extreme but you get the idea). On the other hand, I don't believe life is so simple as what we see on the surface. Teeming behind our eyes are a million thoughts, dreams, ideas, hopes, fears, and what have you, not to mention countless seconds spent having all of these things! A tree is not exactly a tree - a tree is senior year in a park, cuddled with a girlfriend, or stories of my cousin climbing one and breaking his arm. A tree does not merely rustle, it sings, and each leaf falling off tinkles like Christmas bells, or stands with its roots in the very blood of history, rooted fiercely, desperately. You see, a tree can be anything that you feel it is, and abstraction in art allows for that - free verse poetry, abstract drawing, even free form and experimental music (in music my tastes are more grounded but I won't rule out something abstract in any form).
The beauty of art is that it can capture so much of life no matter how you tell it. I can draw a hand, and sketch the thinest details into it, every single wrinkle produced from thousands of days of work. Or I can draw just an outline, perhaps not even a hand, perhaps a claw, or the tiniest little fingers. Conveying life: that is what I want to do! McCloud even has a category for such desires in an artist: iconoclast. Because life, even at its darkest, has something heavenly about it. As I like to say, even a tragedy is beautiful. Our very existence is miraculous! And here we are, everyday interacting with this world, never once thinking about the brush of a shoulder or the hundredth time we've walked into a particular building. I try to, at least once every time I ride the bus to and from school, look out the window as we're passing by an avenue, and watch it stretch out, see the buildings in the distance stand so majestically. I'm mesmorized by clouds, dazzled by pidgeons. There is a silence to life, underlying everything, and I'd like to sing it.
Life can never be fully conveyed, of course. Hell, I even wrote a poem about that very idea! But then, life can never be fully understood either - one always learns, always. I take my lessons with interest and a smile, but I've learned the most through friendships, through experience, through taking moments to look at the ocean and sigh. The main purpose of art, at its deepest core, is expression of...something. An idea, an emotion, an idealogy, anything that needs to be expressed. I see it as an opportunity - what can I express to you that you haven't thought of before? They say we're telling the same stories over and over again, fine, but how can the way I tell it affect you? I'll necessarily add perhaps a tinge of despair to a sunny day, some rain to your smile, my entire middle school experience to a discussion of post-colonial literature, and what will you feel then? I think the thing that us high-aspiration type artists strive for is simply showing you an image, a life, a place, a thing that you haven't thought about before, even if it's just a change in perspective. What did Hamlet look like to Ophelia? Ah, a much different story comes about! The artist says, "hey, life is out there, have you seen it? I'm sure you have, but have you seen what I've seen?" And every once in a while, you read something or see something or hear something, some piece of artistic expression, and you open your eyes and your heart swells up, and whisper an "ah" of discovery. I live for those moments, and I only hope to give them to someone else someday...
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Write a Sonnet (A Poem)
In keeping with some semblance of regularity, here's a poem I wrote in all of probably 15 minutes for a poetry site online. The catch for the submissions of each month to this particular site is that they have to conform to some prompt that they give. This month's prompt was to pick some phrase from a list of 40 they posted, use that as the title of the poem, and go from there. I kept the site in my toolbar bookmarks so I'd remember to eventually take my shot at it, and on Sunday I finally had enough time to spit one out! Honestly, I'm not sure how good this poem is. For one thing, I don't talk so much about sonnets, just poetry in general - this was definitely one of those cases where I saw the title, and I immediately thought up the first line, and from there I was in a bit of a trance and didn't think much about how it all pertained to the title that I was basing it all on. I mean, I'm sure it's not a terrible poem, I've written much worse (thank you high school!), but I never really gave it any revision except for a quick read over, I haven't even read over it posting it here! Then again, since it's so fresh, I doubt I'd change much yet, I usually wait longer. My biggest issue is just the line breaks, I didn't think much about them, whether I should format it all differently or not, and so aside from a few fixes it mostly just stayed the way it spilled out of my head.
Which is where you lucky readers come in! As all, comments are appreciated, so if there's any suggestions then they'd be super appreciated, and would be rewarded with love and respect and other intangible forms of payment. The hardest part about writing is actually just as you've finished, because you have no idea if what you've just made fully works or not - maybe a passage is a little unclear, or there are some lines that you loved while writing but, ultimately, aren't really necessary. That's what critiquing is for! Unfortunately I'm not in any poetry circles, nor am I currently enrolled in any poetry classes/workshops. All I've got is a tiny little speck of a blog on the vast universe of the internet. So if you've got some time and some thoughts about the poem, please leave them in the comment section on the way out, cause hearing you suck is better than hearing nothing at all.
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Write a Sonnet
by Matthew Stalbaum
but don't just write a sonnet, don't
drone your rhymes and dull ink scratches,
can you perhaps smell it, let the words
drift in the air to catch wandering
people with a taste for your thoughts
or hear each line sing like a sheet
of music, with sweet harmonies in all
their majors and minors, or touch it
just place your hand on the page and feel
the bumps and dips and mountains and valleys
of each feeling and then soar through them
and go along strangely colored skies,
let fly your hands in the clouds and snatch
godliness and goodliness and sweetliness
from them or for them, and then see your
sonnet, standing or sitting, smiling or frowning,
but surely being, like a child and just as
naive and frail, and then send it off as
you should, into sunrises and sets...
but don't ever just write a sonnet,
can you live it?
Which is where you lucky readers come in! As all, comments are appreciated, so if there's any suggestions then they'd be super appreciated, and would be rewarded with love and respect and other intangible forms of payment. The hardest part about writing is actually just as you've finished, because you have no idea if what you've just made fully works or not - maybe a passage is a little unclear, or there are some lines that you loved while writing but, ultimately, aren't really necessary. That's what critiquing is for! Unfortunately I'm not in any poetry circles, nor am I currently enrolled in any poetry classes/workshops. All I've got is a tiny little speck of a blog on the vast universe of the internet. So if you've got some time and some thoughts about the poem, please leave them in the comment section on the way out, cause hearing you suck is better than hearing nothing at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Write a Sonnet
by Matthew Stalbaum
but don't just write a sonnet, don't
drone your rhymes and dull ink scratches,
can you perhaps smell it, let the words
drift in the air to catch wandering
people with a taste for your thoughts
or hear each line sing like a sheet
of music, with sweet harmonies in all
their majors and minors, or touch it
just place your hand on the page and feel
the bumps and dips and mountains and valleys
of each feeling and then soar through them
and go along strangely colored skies,
let fly your hands in the clouds and snatch
godliness and goodliness and sweetliness
from them or for them, and then see your
sonnet, standing or sitting, smiling or frowning,
but surely being, like a child and just as
naive and frail, and then send it off as
you should, into sunrises and sets...
but don't ever just write a sonnet,
can you live it?
Friday, September 18, 2009
Your Youness (A Poem)
I'm gonna try something new and write before the poem instead of after, only because I'm getting used to weird formatting in terms of my more abstractly structured poems, and this one isn't anything like the last one, but I figure it's good to get in the habit.
I got the base idea for this poem (which is actually the 4th stanza, believe it or not) during my Theory of Drama class, and it had nothing to do with Drama or Theory, just a crush on a girl in the class. I kept stealing glances at her and half hoping she'd notice, half being terrified by that idea. The girl was also in my British Lit I class, and I've seen her in various other places around campus since Freshman year, yet I've only just learned her name because of this class, because the professor enjoys calling role. Perhaps she likes me too, will stalk my facebook, see I have this blog, read this poem, and we'll fall madly in love! Yes, and then there will be world peace and no more disease forever...
Anyways, I haven't written any poetry in a while, and since the first thing I've written/am posting since my last piece is a love poem, I thought I'd say something more about my blog's name. Would I consider this a bad love poem? Yes. Why? Because it's a love poem. Because throughout it's entire conception, even beneath the actual literary themes I was trying to address (oh, there are some of those in it too?), I was thinking of her, thinking of love, thinking of how she put on her jacket after class and how I fell in love with her again. I did have a direction with this piece that I tried to make a bit clearer in my 30-second proofread, but ultimately, it's a love poem, even at it's blackest heart.
I hate to comment on the themes of my own poetry because if you can't get them then I'm doing something wrong, and if I tell you them then of course you'll see them, but at least look at the 4th full stanza ("That lovely blackness round your being"), because it's undoubtedly not the type of stanza for your average love poem, with it's slightly darker opening lines (I leave you to interpreting)...but even at it's darkest messages, this is a love poem, because no matter what Youness I'm in love with, well, goddamit I'm in love.
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by Matthew Stalbaum
I like your glasses and how they sit on your
Nose so, I like your nose too, and your
Breathing, your motions like water over my heart,
And your stare, so intent, broken by a smile, a laugh
Always so sweet like melodies, always, just…
Always…always…always…always.
Don’t brush your hair behind your ear, you’ll surely
Kill me, as will your sigh and your writing and your walk,
Don’t move, though I’m sure that will kill me too, I cannot
Even look at your youness I’d stop all over to hold it there
Frozen like a stone or a poem, never revise, never breath, never…
Never…never…never…never…
Have you noticed that I notice from afar? Your ticks and twitches,
Like flicks of paint across my eyes, such lovely
Yellows and purples and maroons and even a bold somethingorother
And you like poetry, no? lit’rature? A rhyme or two?
And perhaps, yes, there I see it…
It…it…it…it……….
That lovely blackness round your being, so deep, so abundant of
Space to fill with the fluff of dreams and darkness behind my eyelids,
Like a canvas, all I know(imagine)to be you(my you)
There’s a rose, and some soft winds, and a thorn but
Only the one, and it scratches and I laugh with your youness…
Dream…dream…dreammmm.
No, don’t move, don’t shatter my
Lovely you, I like you like this, should I
Ever touch you I’m afraid it all would shatter,
I’ll never set eyes on another, not ever light or flesh, only
Your smile, your stare, your youness, your smile, only…
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Difference Between a Ramble and an Essay
This is a ramble, which I'll explain in a second. A friend read my last post and complained about it's length, and though it's probably longer than it has to be, I don't see any reason to apologize for that. I tried to explain that it was I call a "rambling," or a "ramble," but I realized that I needed to ramble in a blog post to fully explain myself.
I have a simple distinction in my ponderous prose, that is, any prose I write that isn't telling a story, be it fiction or non-fiction: essays and rambles. Essays are what you'd expect them to be, well thought-out and reasoned arguments or discussions that come to a conclusion of some sort, whatever that means. The important distinction here is that they are thought-out. If say I've posted an essay, that means I've considered the beginning and end of it even before writing (probably no outline but at least some degree of extensive planning), have written it out in Word, proofread it multiple times, considered whether my arguments are sound, whether there's some more complicated angle that I haven't explored yet - a short essay could take as long as a week to write, considering all the time I would like to spend composing it. What is a ramble? Definitely not thought-out. I tackle a ramble spontaneously, without any planning, just letting my thoughts spill out right into the blog-post window as they would come, and without a moments proofread afterwards either. Once a ramble is written, it's written, and I click "Publish Post" and there it is in its raw (and only) form.
That's not to say I don't take my rambles seriously - though the thoughts are spilling out, I do try and make sure they make sense and follow some train of logic. It's not just a meaningless exercise in argument but, to put it better, a sort of public journal, a way to take some topic or some idea and dwell on it for a bit. In the course of a ramble I might consider things I hadn't thought of before, or I might digress. I post it because, if anything, a ramble should be commented on more than an essay, since in a ramble you are encountering ideas as they are developing, and so there is more room for constructive discussion and such. If the ideas of a ramble come to meaningful maturity, an essay can be made from the progress between the 1st simple thought and the profound end. But don't lose any sleep over understanding a ramble, because it is, in a sense, the equivalent of me talking to myself.
So if you read anything I write and notice that I've called it a rambling, don't be scared and think it will be incomprehensible, but also understand that if it is of some monstrous length, that's only because I was following a spontaneous train of thought and had no preset road to go along in my reasoning. Organization will be lacking, but hopefully there are ideas therein that are worth pondering over. I think ramblings should be funner to read, to see one's thoughts in their truest state as opposed to the refinements we make afterwards that are like make-up and wardrobe - you'll never get any closer to the real writer than seeing his thoughts just as they come to him. For the sake of my friend, I won't make this blog post any longer, just a note for the future...
I have a simple distinction in my ponderous prose, that is, any prose I write that isn't telling a story, be it fiction or non-fiction: essays and rambles. Essays are what you'd expect them to be, well thought-out and reasoned arguments or discussions that come to a conclusion of some sort, whatever that means. The important distinction here is that they are thought-out. If say I've posted an essay, that means I've considered the beginning and end of it even before writing (probably no outline but at least some degree of extensive planning), have written it out in Word, proofread it multiple times, considered whether my arguments are sound, whether there's some more complicated angle that I haven't explored yet - a short essay could take as long as a week to write, considering all the time I would like to spend composing it. What is a ramble? Definitely not thought-out. I tackle a ramble spontaneously, without any planning, just letting my thoughts spill out right into the blog-post window as they would come, and without a moments proofread afterwards either. Once a ramble is written, it's written, and I click "Publish Post" and there it is in its raw (and only) form.
That's not to say I don't take my rambles seriously - though the thoughts are spilling out, I do try and make sure they make sense and follow some train of logic. It's not just a meaningless exercise in argument but, to put it better, a sort of public journal, a way to take some topic or some idea and dwell on it for a bit. In the course of a ramble I might consider things I hadn't thought of before, or I might digress. I post it because, if anything, a ramble should be commented on more than an essay, since in a ramble you are encountering ideas as they are developing, and so there is more room for constructive discussion and such. If the ideas of a ramble come to meaningful maturity, an essay can be made from the progress between the 1st simple thought and the profound end. But don't lose any sleep over understanding a ramble, because it is, in a sense, the equivalent of me talking to myself.
So if you read anything I write and notice that I've called it a rambling, don't be scared and think it will be incomprehensible, but also understand that if it is of some monstrous length, that's only because I was following a spontaneous train of thought and had no preset road to go along in my reasoning. Organization will be lacking, but hopefully there are ideas therein that are worth pondering over. I think ramblings should be funner to read, to see one's thoughts in their truest state as opposed to the refinements we make afterwards that are like make-up and wardrobe - you'll never get any closer to the real writer than seeing his thoughts just as they come to him. For the sake of my friend, I won't make this blog post any longer, just a note for the future...
All That's Best of Dark and Bright...
Ah, it's been longer than I wanted since I wrote here last, had to get settled into the new dorm, figure out a set schedule for life, the usual beginning of semester busy-work. Hopefully I'll have more regular postings here, at least bi-weekly if not weekly, poetry and short stories will appear shortly - especially since I have a ton of poetry ideas written down, and a few beers to help with the inspiration (though wine is typically better for verse!). Anyways, I do have something real to write about, so I'll stop this current ramble and move onto a more pretentious one so I can get some sleep. Speaking of sleep...
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I'm afraid of the dark. I've written about it before, I'm not shy about telling people, at the most I find it frustrating - midnight snacks, or I should say 3 in the morning snacks, are a little less fun when all the shadows in the adjoining room are silhouettes of boogie-men and ghosts. But there isn't much abnormal about my fear, that is, no blatantly illogical reason for this fear. It is not a phobia, since they tend to be debilitating and I am sitting in darkness right now and am perfectly fine. It actually fits in with my personality fairly well.
Let me start with a question: have you ever tried to think of infinity? As in, really considered the end of the endless? In high school, when I started my downward slope into atheism (sorry to give atheism a negative connotation, I just didn't want to become an atheist, I had hoped my wonder and child-like innocence would afford me a God but no such luck - this is all another blog post), I thought about, if there is a God, what is He like, why did He make us, etc. Sometimes my ponderings took me to the question of, even if something did intentionally create us, couldn't something have created that? Which left the inevitable reasoning that something could have created that, and something could have created that, as far back as time can extend (which is a pretty far ways). I would also think of what would happen after the universe died off, entropy took its course, and all the stars faded into black and there was only darkness, the google of years of nothingness and then infinity still to go. Just thinking about these endless progressions though, I would get started and find myself trapped in them, until I grew actually scared and uneasy at considering a time so far beyond myself. Outside the boundary of knowable time sat a world I could not comprehend, and it frightened me.
The thing about infinity is that, when trying to think about it in terms of time, there is the foreseeable future and the conceivable past, things that light can be shed on or at least faintly touch and illuminate, but outside of that there is only an absolute blackness that can't be breached by any realm of the imagination.
I realized why I was scared of the dark when thinking about it one night. It is actually incorrect to say that one is afraid of the dark - darkness itself is never what one is truly afraid of, but what could possibly (or impossibly for that matter) be dwelling in the darkness. Darkness itself will not consume you but the monsters that lie in hiding just might. And what do these monsters look like? They can be anything, from ghosts to vampires to a mysterious stranger waiting along the alleyways. The thing that's frightening about darkness is that anything can be hiding in it. Imagine coming across a doorway that was filled with solid blackness, so thick that if you stuck your hand in it, it would immediately disappear, and you would have to trust by your trembling that they still existed. What would grab at your hand? Perhaps nothing, perhaps just another hand, perhaps a slimy tentacle, perhaps some amorphous mass of flesh and bone. You cannot guess what it could be, you can only dream, and any and every dream could be a possibility.
I couldn't help but think of the relation of blackness, then, to whiteness? If blackness is terrifying because it is infinite, because anything can be called forth from it, why does whiteness not inspire such fear? Can't it be just as infinite, being one solid color? Yet whiteness is often associated with the canvas, with the blank page, with something that's physically solid. The blank easle can be terrifying too, though, in it's own right - does one dare to disturb the pristine perfection already lying there with some self-rightous dash? How does one tell if a sketch is important enough to say of it that it must exist and that others must know of it as well? There is an aspect of limitlessness with whiteness as well, only it is not how far one can reach into it, it is what can one do with it, what can one put on it? What can be created on this whiteness?
Imagine darkness as inspiration, imagination, and whiteness as creation, since every creation needs some sort of inspiration, and for any inspiration to take form, it needs to be created. Drag something from the dark pits of blackness and toss it against a wall of whiteness and you have art - black and white combined in an infinite selection of possibilities.
Yet this infinity can still be terrifying, for what will you find there in the darkness? And once found, exactly how should it be tossed against the white canvas? At every step in the artistic process, for every second between an artist conceiving the bare bones of an idea and the final punctuation mark, there is an overwhelming question: is this right? It is as simple as that, because coupled with that question is the possibility that there is something better, and there is always something better. What if Crime and Punishment had been told by a writer of the Lost Generation, or if Garden State had been done in the golden age of Hollywood? Perhaps the story could not have been conceived the exact same way, but the differences wouldn't necessarily detract from anything, and who knows, perhaps in the new setting there would be some aspect that connects so much closer to the audience. Could this idea have been more complex, more enlightening? Was it told the right way?
How ironic, though, that this chance for infinite possibilities is one of the greatest assets to art as well! It is wonderful to have a thought and let it grow as you would have it, give or take the inevitable conditioning of life. And then to have no boundaries on how this thought should take form in the world! It is a fearful thing to create, but it is a marvelous thing too. I am scared to look into dark closets, fearful of what I might find, and yet I love to close my eyes, and in the darkness of my mind to dream. And I grow anxious as to whether a story sounds right, whether it could be done better, but then if I should feel that the words should be orderly and proper, or tossed wildly with reckless passion, I am able to choose, and how they fall upon the page.
I do not know if there is a God, but perhaps I can be one either way - after all, why need I be fearful of the infinity of the outer universe when I can control the infinity of my own universe?
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I'm afraid of the dark. I've written about it before, I'm not shy about telling people, at the most I find it frustrating - midnight snacks, or I should say 3 in the morning snacks, are a little less fun when all the shadows in the adjoining room are silhouettes of boogie-men and ghosts. But there isn't much abnormal about my fear, that is, no blatantly illogical reason for this fear. It is not a phobia, since they tend to be debilitating and I am sitting in darkness right now and am perfectly fine. It actually fits in with my personality fairly well.
Let me start with a question: have you ever tried to think of infinity? As in, really considered the end of the endless? In high school, when I started my downward slope into atheism (sorry to give atheism a negative connotation, I just didn't want to become an atheist, I had hoped my wonder and child-like innocence would afford me a God but no such luck - this is all another blog post), I thought about, if there is a God, what is He like, why did He make us, etc. Sometimes my ponderings took me to the question of, even if something did intentionally create us, couldn't something have created that? Which left the inevitable reasoning that something could have created that, and something could have created that, as far back as time can extend (which is a pretty far ways). I would also think of what would happen after the universe died off, entropy took its course, and all the stars faded into black and there was only darkness, the google of years of nothingness and then infinity still to go. Just thinking about these endless progressions though, I would get started and find myself trapped in them, until I grew actually scared and uneasy at considering a time so far beyond myself. Outside the boundary of knowable time sat a world I could not comprehend, and it frightened me.
The thing about infinity is that, when trying to think about it in terms of time, there is the foreseeable future and the conceivable past, things that light can be shed on or at least faintly touch and illuminate, but outside of that there is only an absolute blackness that can't be breached by any realm of the imagination.
I realized why I was scared of the dark when thinking about it one night. It is actually incorrect to say that one is afraid of the dark - darkness itself is never what one is truly afraid of, but what could possibly (or impossibly for that matter) be dwelling in the darkness. Darkness itself will not consume you but the monsters that lie in hiding just might. And what do these monsters look like? They can be anything, from ghosts to vampires to a mysterious stranger waiting along the alleyways. The thing that's frightening about darkness is that anything can be hiding in it. Imagine coming across a doorway that was filled with solid blackness, so thick that if you stuck your hand in it, it would immediately disappear, and you would have to trust by your trembling that they still existed. What would grab at your hand? Perhaps nothing, perhaps just another hand, perhaps a slimy tentacle, perhaps some amorphous mass of flesh and bone. You cannot guess what it could be, you can only dream, and any and every dream could be a possibility.
I couldn't help but think of the relation of blackness, then, to whiteness? If blackness is terrifying because it is infinite, because anything can be called forth from it, why does whiteness not inspire such fear? Can't it be just as infinite, being one solid color? Yet whiteness is often associated with the canvas, with the blank page, with something that's physically solid. The blank easle can be terrifying too, though, in it's own right - does one dare to disturb the pristine perfection already lying there with some self-rightous dash? How does one tell if a sketch is important enough to say of it that it must exist and that others must know of it as well? There is an aspect of limitlessness with whiteness as well, only it is not how far one can reach into it, it is what can one do with it, what can one put on it? What can be created on this whiteness?
Imagine darkness as inspiration, imagination, and whiteness as creation, since every creation needs some sort of inspiration, and for any inspiration to take form, it needs to be created. Drag something from the dark pits of blackness and toss it against a wall of whiteness and you have art - black and white combined in an infinite selection of possibilities.
Yet this infinity can still be terrifying, for what will you find there in the darkness? And once found, exactly how should it be tossed against the white canvas? At every step in the artistic process, for every second between an artist conceiving the bare bones of an idea and the final punctuation mark, there is an overwhelming question: is this right? It is as simple as that, because coupled with that question is the possibility that there is something better, and there is always something better. What if Crime and Punishment had been told by a writer of the Lost Generation, or if Garden State had been done in the golden age of Hollywood? Perhaps the story could not have been conceived the exact same way, but the differences wouldn't necessarily detract from anything, and who knows, perhaps in the new setting there would be some aspect that connects so much closer to the audience. Could this idea have been more complex, more enlightening? Was it told the right way?
How ironic, though, that this chance for infinite possibilities is one of the greatest assets to art as well! It is wonderful to have a thought and let it grow as you would have it, give or take the inevitable conditioning of life. And then to have no boundaries on how this thought should take form in the world! It is a fearful thing to create, but it is a marvelous thing too. I am scared to look into dark closets, fearful of what I might find, and yet I love to close my eyes, and in the darkness of my mind to dream. And I grow anxious as to whether a story sounds right, whether it could be done better, but then if I should feel that the words should be orderly and proper, or tossed wildly with reckless passion, I am able to choose, and how they fall upon the page.
I do not know if there is a God, but perhaps I can be one either way - after all, why need I be fearful of the infinity of the outer universe when I can control the infinity of my own universe?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Poetry as Life
For as long as I've been writing creatively, I've considered myself a fiction man - my technique might need work, but for the most part I'm comfortable with getting a plot, characters, some semblance of themes, all down on a blank writing canvas. These were things I could think about easily, and the only question overwhelming questions between each story would be what perspective should it be told in, what voice should be speaking, etc. It's very simple to say, "this happened, then this happened, and the characters thought this of it, and then this happened." Fiction can also be a very safe place to work in - not everyone is expected to be a Joyce or a Melville, so long as you can put down a sentence with a fair amount of commas, apostrophes, and add a period at the end, you can say whatever you want to say.
Poetry has been different case with me, though. In my younger years (which feels ironic to say, considering I'm only 19, hardly my golden years really) I would dabble in it, but only with rhymes. I tried my hand at a few free verse poems but, to be honest, couldn't feel the poetry in it. I felt that the only thing that made those poems was the continued rhythm of those rhymes, having those beats fall to each expected end, and without that steady pulse it was just prose. I knew many had written free verse, well too in fact, but I couldn't write the beautiful images those poets could at least get down, I just hoped a clever enough rhyme would come to me in time - it never did, really.
I find rhymes have always been constrictive, though, of the essence of poetry, which is...well, the essence of whatever you're writing about. Poetry used to consist solely of those trademark rhymes, and what a tedious way life must have been in. Perhaps they reflect a nobler effort, of trying to describe the perfection of the world through the most musical aspects of language - and then Milton fucked it all up by aiming to illustrate chaos and Pandemonium. These rhymes still have their place in poetry; I have to say that because damn near everything has its place in poetry now!
With the advent of free verse, something interesting happened with poetry: it ceased to show just one perspective and one voice on the world. That's somewhat of a simplification, but it's true to an extent. No matter what style or images were used, the air a poet breathed could only be translated down onto paper if "air" or some other synonym happened to have a conjoining rhyme - there had to be a certain perfection in the language for the music to pour out. But the world is hardly so simple. There is indeed a perfection to its creation, a mystical sort of drama about it, where everything has its place in the infinite spectrum of cycles and chains, but there is also a chaos that reigns free, the blind Chance that has the ultimate say in the writing of fate. Not only that, but beneath the simple, solid surfaces that we touch everyday are a teeming mass of wildly animated atoms, leaving one to wonder just how the ties of creation manage to hold together amidst all the hectic motion.
This is where free verse comes in: free verse is freely able to convey an infinite amount of aspects when describing something, simply because it is not bound by any convention. Language itself need not follow its own rules. When it comes to the written word, it is the closest to coming at the essence of life itself, perhaps only because the free verse poet has choice: he may put down a simple image in simple words and let it stand on its own, or he can fill it with metaphors and similes and various other literary tricks, or perhaps he sees that this image evokes far too many emotions and thoughts to honestly convey it all in the confines of syntax and sentence progression, and he puts scores of words down on the page with only the organization of a feeling in order to get at the pure, unbridled chaos of it all. Words are spelled wrong, and entire stanzas go by without a single preposition or piece of punctuation, or maybe not even a single noun or adjective, just verb after verb after verb until, all put together, they seem to spell something that can't even be defined by the small title of the piece. This propensity for chaos is what gives poetry its true power - one need not use it, but the option is always a must for the artist. It is always more rewarding to paint a straight line knowing that it is a choice that one does that instead of flinging paint against the wall.
Each poem, then, is a transcription of the way the poet views the world. Sometimes I am tempted to simply forgo punctuation, for what place does it have in life? But then, that is just me, and not even me all the time - I still write much poetry in simple, conventional terms, often just getting a bare image down and hoping it means something. Poetry should never be constricted to simply the comfortable form of writing one has grown accustomed to, or what one thinks is expected. Perhaps every poet, on conceiving a new piece, should close his eyes, and wonder to himself: "these lines I want to write, will they be meticulously crafted and plotted, using the finest of brushes and details? Or shall I embrace the abstract in the hopes of attempting at some unbridled emotion?"
Poetry has been different case with me, though. In my younger years (which feels ironic to say, considering I'm only 19, hardly my golden years really) I would dabble in it, but only with rhymes. I tried my hand at a few free verse poems but, to be honest, couldn't feel the poetry in it. I felt that the only thing that made those poems was the continued rhythm of those rhymes, having those beats fall to each expected end, and without that steady pulse it was just prose. I knew many had written free verse, well too in fact, but I couldn't write the beautiful images those poets could at least get down, I just hoped a clever enough rhyme would come to me in time - it never did, really.
I find rhymes have always been constrictive, though, of the essence of poetry, which is...well, the essence of whatever you're writing about. Poetry used to consist solely of those trademark rhymes, and what a tedious way life must have been in. Perhaps they reflect a nobler effort, of trying to describe the perfection of the world through the most musical aspects of language - and then Milton fucked it all up by aiming to illustrate chaos and Pandemonium. These rhymes still have their place in poetry; I have to say that because damn near everything has its place in poetry now!
With the advent of free verse, something interesting happened with poetry: it ceased to show just one perspective and one voice on the world. That's somewhat of a simplification, but it's true to an extent. No matter what style or images were used, the air a poet breathed could only be translated down onto paper if "air" or some other synonym happened to have a conjoining rhyme - there had to be a certain perfection in the language for the music to pour out. But the world is hardly so simple. There is indeed a perfection to its creation, a mystical sort of drama about it, where everything has its place in the infinite spectrum of cycles and chains, but there is also a chaos that reigns free, the blind Chance that has the ultimate say in the writing of fate. Not only that, but beneath the simple, solid surfaces that we touch everyday are a teeming mass of wildly animated atoms, leaving one to wonder just how the ties of creation manage to hold together amidst all the hectic motion.
This is where free verse comes in: free verse is freely able to convey an infinite amount of aspects when describing something, simply because it is not bound by any convention. Language itself need not follow its own rules. When it comes to the written word, it is the closest to coming at the essence of life itself, perhaps only because the free verse poet has choice: he may put down a simple image in simple words and let it stand on its own, or he can fill it with metaphors and similes and various other literary tricks, or perhaps he sees that this image evokes far too many emotions and thoughts to honestly convey it all in the confines of syntax and sentence progression, and he puts scores of words down on the page with only the organization of a feeling in order to get at the pure, unbridled chaos of it all. Words are spelled wrong, and entire stanzas go by without a single preposition or piece of punctuation, or maybe not even a single noun or adjective, just verb after verb after verb until, all put together, they seem to spell something that can't even be defined by the small title of the piece. This propensity for chaos is what gives poetry its true power - one need not use it, but the option is always a must for the artist. It is always more rewarding to paint a straight line knowing that it is a choice that one does that instead of flinging paint against the wall.
Each poem, then, is a transcription of the way the poet views the world. Sometimes I am tempted to simply forgo punctuation, for what place does it have in life? But then, that is just me, and not even me all the time - I still write much poetry in simple, conventional terms, often just getting a bare image down and hoping it means something. Poetry should never be constricted to simply the comfortable form of writing one has grown accustomed to, or what one thinks is expected. Perhaps every poet, on conceiving a new piece, should close his eyes, and wonder to himself: "these lines I want to write, will they be meticulously crafted and plotted, using the finest of brushes and details? Or shall I embrace the abstract in the hopes of attempting at some unbridled emotion?"
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