To Stop Feeling Futile

We discussed "Song of Myself" in poetry tutorial today. I have not yet read the whole thing, but I think it is beautiful. My favourite section so far is the following passage:

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

What I recognize in this passage is courage - the courage that must have been necessary, in Whitman's time, to stand up for the status of the body and the value of sex. Evidently this courage would be necessary even today, as people were laughing in my poetry class about his erotic language.

What Whitman reminded me is that poets must write for the people, and that poets must stick true to their vision. Poetry is not just a vehicle for excessive emotions. Poetry has the power of vivid and sometimes frightening imagery, as well as memorable phrasing - they use these tricks all the time in advertising - so it does have, in part, the responsibility of nurturing new values, of changing the societal landscape.

I am only twenty. It is stupid to be anxious over whether or not I will end a writer, just because I don't always have a poem in progress in my mind. I do not yet have the vision Whitman or Wordsworth had. The important thing is that I've pushed myself. But beyond that, it doesn't matter if I don't get published or not this year. I've done a lot of work this school year already: I've started to learn about poetic theory; I've memorized many poems; I've pushed myself to read more, and to read with an open mind, and read not only famous poets but less respected ones as well. Because if I really want to call myself a writer, I need to live and breathe literature - the common as well as the canon.

For now, that's enough. No need to feel that my efforts are futile. I might not even become a writer if things don't work out.

School is getting better. I don't mind the labs or physics classes as much anymore. It is foolish as well to think that science is not useful. These will probably be my last physics classes so I'll just have to enjoy them while I can. No need to feel that they are wastes of time.

How soon, unaccountable, I became sick and tired

I haven't been posting much lately. In fact, I haven't been writing much lately at all - no poetry, no ideas for poetry. I've been feeling lazy, tired, sick.

Part of it is school. I just don't really like my classes, other than Fantasy&Horror and Poetry. Apart from those two courses, this term I have Practical Physics, Classical Mechanics, and Basic Statistical Mechanics. In fact I added Classical Mechanics after dropping two classes - Introduction to Real Analysis, and Theories of Sexuality: Contemporary Perspectives. The former I dropped because I did not have enough energy to sit through another math class for a semester; the latter I felt was too philosophical. I'd bought the textbook--non-refundable--and I was sitting through the second class and halfway through I realized I had no idea what the professor was talking about, and moreover that I felt sick discussing sex through a lens so philosophical. I preferred the approach we took in UNI255, investigating studies of actual human sexual behaviour, not examining vague declarations how sexuality is "liminal" or how it simultaneously "permeates, fuels, and yet subtracts itself from the predominant economy of exchange in capitalist societies" -- which is basically saying nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

Subsequently I swallowed my pride and emailed the whole class to resell my non-refundable textbook for a slightly lower price, then dropped the course, and math. I needed a 5th course, and I'd sat through the first class of Classical Mechanics and it's the only core third-year physics course I lack, so it was the logical choice. As well, Adrienne, Desmond and Cassie are in the class.

Recently, though, I've been overwhelmed by the despair that I get from studying science. I had a long chat with Adrienne tonight about this and I recalled this poem by Walt Whitman, entitled "When I heard the learn'd astronomer".

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure

them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in

the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

I used to dislike this poem, used to think, "What does Whitman know about astronomy and physics?" But perhaps he knew more, because right now science makes me feel just sick to the core. In my childhood I remember being entranced by the planets, the cratered face of Mercury, the smooth icy crust of Europa under which lay a vast subterranean ocean. This fascination with space is what drew me to physics in the first place. But this fascination is gone and in its place only a deep sense of loss.

In my Fantasy&Horror class, we read Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" -- his treatise on the genre of fantasy literature. In it he talked about "recovery", the regaining of a clear view of our universe. And he says, "We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses— and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make."

This is what I need. Recovery. The power to behold even the planets and stars anew. This light only literature ignites, only language calls forth.

Poetry - Conscious or Emotional?

I went to a poetry workshop today. So you are probably thinking that I had lots of fun and felt extremely inspired and excited that I did. But I'll be frank and tell you that I didn't.

The workshop was very strange. I found myself surrounded by a lot of older women - upper-class, judging from their clothing, though that isn't to say there were no other guys. The poet who led the workshop, while nice, did not really have the same mentality to me towards poetry. She encouraged us to do exercises in free-writing and to not think about anything: we were to just tap into the energy of the words.

Now, I do agree that words have different types of energy. A word can have specific or variable rhythms, pitches, and sound; it

brings with it particular connotations, histories, and associations. However, that is precisely my problem with free-writing. I can't not think when I write poetry because I need to consider all these sounds and meanings and associations.

In my opinion, poetry needs to reveal itself to be conscious. If I just took a bunch of words, and slapped them into lines, I would not be able to say that I'm writing poetry. Perhaps it is just me, by the word "poetry" implies some sort of deliberateness, some sort of awareness in the sounds and the ways to play with words, and what I was doing today was just breaking things up into lines. (I guess you could do that if you were William Carlos Williams, but you could say interesting things about his use of meter). Honestly, I have enough of a problem calling a few of my works 'poems' because I don't feel like my use of language in those works is quite conscious enough.

Perhaps that is why I like rhyme so much -- because it gives the sense that the poet is aware of the sound, and that the poet is skilled enough to weave the rhymes into a meaningful pattern. Maybe I'm just more of a technical writer, and I don't mean I'm a science/engineering writer: I mean I enjoy using analyzing and using rhetorical techniques. Without rhyme, I feel lost. In fact, since I started writing again, all of my poems contain rhyme to varying degrees.

I think that "freewriting" just totally ignores the techniques that great poets have used in the past. I honestly don't think Shakespeare freewrote his sonnets; his metre is too regular for that. In the workshop, some of the women kept smiling serenely and nodding their head to everything the poet said, and in the back of my mind I just kept thinking "no... I don't really agree."

The workshop was just geared more towards people who wanted to open up their emotions and express themselves through an unfamiliar literary form. I don't have a problem with that. I did though start to feel sick in that room. The combination of the heat and the blatant emotionalism was getting to me. One of the upper-class women actually cried because she got so emotional. I didn't notice until she made a comment about how emotional the workshop was, and said "You guys saw me crying". Apparently she had transformed a line about life into a line about death. I know, I'm being really insensitive and cynical here. But I can't help it. I myself was starting to feel strangely emotional about nothing whatsoever and I just wanted to leave the room.

Is the role of poetry to capture overflowing emotions? Perhaps it can be. But at the same time, I also believe that the emotion in poetry has to be somehow controlled and reined in. There has to be enough skill present in the poem that I can believe that the poet is someone who I can trust knew what he or she was doing. Furthermore, everyone gets emotional at times, but I believe we have a responsibility to put that emotion to use. If we all just spewed out emotions and arranged them in lines and published them... then what good are poems? What is the poem's function in the world if it can't persuade, if it doesn't consider that there will be an audience, if it does not alter societal discourse in any way? What is the point of writing another poem when there are so many out there already?

I really don't think emotionalism and consciousness necessarily exist as two separate spheres. Indeed, I think the times at which I feel the most inspired to and capable of writing are when they act in tandem with each other: when I am consciously using metre, sound, language to express emotions, and when simultaneously I'm vividly emotional about this conscious experience. When I'm solely emotional, I don't write poems; I write diary entries. When I'm solely conscious, I don't write poems; I write flat, uninteresting lines.

I realize I do sound cynical, insensitive, and perhaps a bit judgmental and defensive. Also I do not want to deter or intimidate anyone from writing or enjoying poetry; however, in my opinion, there is a difference between being knowledgeable and humble about the techniques of poetry and completely ignoring them in favour of unbounded emotion. It is like saying anyone could paint a picture if they "looked to their heart for inspiration" - yes, everyone can do that, but it takes years, talent, effort, and luck to internalize an understanding of the elements of visual art and more to develop the technique and vision to employ them. To use another analogy, i could of course say that "everyone can do physics" but it takes years and years to get an intuition for the field so that one can make educated, well-supported hypotheses and create precise, accurate experiments.

Someone please comment and challenge my beliefs: I need an outside opinion. As for now, this is where my argument stands.

Worship

Time for a poem, I think. It's a little raunchy, though (but you can skip over it if you find it is not to your taste).

---

Shove my face

Against your groin.
Grind it in.
I want to
Taste mouthfuls
Of that coarse hair,
Breathe nothing
But your body

scent. Pungent

Yet warm, like

Incense, incense.
Your body is my
Altar; here I'll
Kneel, please,

Please: drag my skin
Onto your flesh
Those rippling
Flanks and muscles.
Drown me in
Your dew, that cocktail
Of spit and sweet sweet sweat.
Wipe my tongue
Across the trunk
Of your hardened thigh,

Tense in its release.

Pin my

arms

beneath my back.
Thrust my

head

against your chest.

Intimacy isn't a held hand

or a hug or a kiss.

This

is what it is:
Power. Control.
What you
(in a white dress shirt, tight trousers, a gold-clasped belt, standing upright. the spitting
image of politeness: as not to offend others.

pretending to be the same so they don't doubt that you're sane. your friend sits across the
table. he's wearing a nice shirt and sweater and an eighty-dollar scarf. you give him a hug

but you barely touch. there is idle talk, trite laughter. the only things you touch are the
stainless steel forks and the droplets that have condensed on your glass of iced water.

you pay the bill. another forty off your till. the bills, the bills. you have no will. you catch a
headline. the government adding a stupid law. you have no power, control, nothing raw.
Don't normally have.

in history, have men ever been so isolated, so powerless
so controlled, so bound

so false?

But I will Offer
You these.

Shove it in then.
Don't kid. Don't lie.
You and I both know.
That love's not real.
This is.

~Me, Nov. 18. Poem inspired by Equus (the play).
EDIT on Nov. 20: Added some lines at the end and shifted around some lines.

I met a poet

On a whim I went
to the lit committee's
event tonight.
I met a poet.

He started in science. Like me.
He took ENG201
with Professor Reibetanz
"Don't rush." This was
Professor Reibetanz's advice, to him.
and loved it. Like me.
Of course, it was a whim
so I was wearing a shirt
with some dirt on it.
But then he arrived late,
so I felt a bit better
about the stain.

He read from his poems.
I was intrigued.
There were a lot of
Hello? Can you hear me?
interruptions. And lot of
play on the words
you and I.
There is no synonym for you.
I looked at his book.
He wrote a sonnet
with computer loading symbols
interspersed between
words and sometimes syllables.
I wanted to read it.

I talked to him then.
He asked if I wrote.
I said I stopped for a while
but started again.

In his poetry book was
a poem called Etude in E Major
(the one by Chopin).
I told him I just played it last summer.
Anyway this can hardly be
called a poem. I'm en-
jambing lines when-
ever I feel like it. But forget
that all. I met I met

I met a poet.

Shiver

Went to the Queer Orientation Meet and Greet yesterday.

I felt a bit awkward. Maybe it was because I was too tired, or maybe it's just the nature of these kinds of events. Then again, awkwardness is my middle name, so no surprises there. In any case, I was talking to a group of four guys in the room. One of them was a CompSci major and the other was an engineering major, and the CompSci major said something to the extent of, "Oh, when I first saw you, you looked really lost, and I was wondering what you were doing in the room since you looked like a very heterosexual male. Not to say that you're not welcome here since we're very open and welcoming." The hell?

The other guy replied, "Well, it's complicated." We then somehow veered to the topic of religion; the engineer said he was Catholic and then the CompSci major started challenging his religion and asking him about his stance and abortion. The CompSci major was like, "Well I can't respect people who don't speak up."

I just turned around and went to talk to other people because there'd already had a big debate on Sunday, for SEC training, and I was tired of feeling tension in the room. Honestly, I am all for speaking out and sticking up for your beliefs, but the engineer wasn't even pushing his beliefs onto others; he had the courage to come to an LGBTQ event and was clearly searching for his identity and his place in the sexual spectrum, but instead got interrogated about his religion and his perceived "ungayness".

I did meet a lot of cool people though, so I'm happy about that. Saw Bryan again and met some of his friends as well :).

I'm also happy about my poetry class, which is really shaping up. We read two poems in class today. When my Prof reached the last word of the poem, the hairs on the back of my neck started standing up.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

--William Carlos Williams

Looks like poetry and I are going to have a good relationship this term.

Godspeed

I found out yesterday that a childhood friend of mine died. She lived really close to me.

I... don't know what to say... especially because I know that her family must be going through so much pain and grief at the moment. But my lack of power eats at me. When I hear something as unexpected as this, what can I actually do? I'm powerless...

Dear Amy,

I'm sorry if I was ever mean to you... I know I probably was when I was younger.

Remember how when we were younger we'd always joke around? You'd always call me "somebody" and I'd nickname you "nobody"? Well, I was wrong, you weren't a nobody and I'm the biggest jerk in the world for having called you that. You were always so kind to me and I am sure your kindness touched many people.

I remember the week my mom went back to Hong Kong, my sis and I were at your house and we'd watching VeggieTales and have pillow fights by the staircases, and play Mario on your GameBoy. We watched VeggieTales so many times that we memorized the lyrics to their songs. I'll miss those times.

I remember seeing you periodically in the library at ACCI, reading. You'd say hi and we'd talk a bit and then get back to studying or reading. I'm sorry I didn't get to know you better.

I'll miss your sincerity and your smile...

Godspeed and rest in peace, Amy.

In my poetry class on Thursday, my Professor told me that she still remembered the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She walked into her class and told them "I'm sorry... I'm really not ready to give a lecture, and I really don't know why I'm here at the moment."

Some students raised their hands and said, "Professor, we know why we're here. We want you to read us some poetry." Her students' words were what brought her back to her senses, and together they began to read some poetry.

They wanted their worlds to be reconstructed after they had been shattered so abruptly. And my Prof argued that poetry does not necessarily represent or reflect the real world ("Universe"), but instead recreates it and sheds to us light and energy.

And although I know I am not as affected by Amy's death as people who were closer to her, I feel somehow shattered. Powerless, in the face of what I know others have to face. Today, I went to SEC training and there was a speaker on oppression, and I started feeling so powerless as well -- there are so many factors and complexities surrounding oppression, how can it ever stop? And I started thinking about how I am probably pretty well off financially; I feel so powerless when I think of how my best friend is always struggling with money.

Like my Prof, I don't know why I'm here, either. I don't know why I continue on with school and I don't what I am to do afterwards. I just hope that I will have enough power to change things, to change lives. But at the same time I can't help thinking that I would ever have the power to change something like this. Right now, I feel hopeless.

So, dear world, read me some poetry,

And, dear poetry, rebuild my world,

recolor my light.

yes is a pleasant country

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

-e. e. cummings

The Songs that Touch Me

I've been meaning to make a post about song lyrics for a while now, but I've never got around to doing it.

A lot of the pop songs out on the radio these days are, frankly, pretty terribly written or engineered or performed. But there are bits and pieces of poetry in some pop artists' pieces, and I find that these songs invariantly end up being the ones that move me the most...

One such artist is Jann Arden. Not all of her songs are good, but there are some gems in there. "If You Loved Me" is one of these gems. Unfortunately, I can't find a YouTube video of it, but here are some lyrics from the bridge, which is my favourite part. The music is really needed to complete the effect though.

I would clench my hands
and hold my breath
and promise to be true

I would never speak
I’d hardly eat
I would not cost a cent

I would watch you sleep
and count your sheep
and lie beside the bed

I would never think
I’d pour your drink
I’d laugh at every joke you tell

I love this part of the song. It captures perfectly all the yearning, selfless feelings that sometimes accompanies love - wanting to take care of someone ("I would watch you sleep and count your sheep"), wanting to please him or her ("I'd pour your drink"). Yet at the some time, there is something ridiculous and obsessive about the narrator's lines. Submission may accompany selflessness. We see it here in her claims ("I'd hardly eat, I would not cost a cent." or "I'd would never think"), and we worry that she will lose herself. She doesn't sound like she has much self-esteem. But that's not surprising. Love may require, in turn, selflessness and submissiveness. And one can lose oneself in love.

Another one such artist is Dido. Now, Dido has been criticized for being a songwriter who writes "vanilla", slow, boring music that appeals only to older women. I think these are valid arguments regarding her first two albums, but not her third album. Her third album, Safe Trip Home, is filled with so much poetry that I feel compelled to return to it again and again. Also of note is the fact that she used only organic sounds for this album. Nothing is electronic and the arrangements are sparse but they are also subtle. A bit tribal, even. Listen to this song, about her father's death...