BEFORE
it’s difficult, in a capitalist society, to know where your genuine desires begin and where internalised narratives about what you should want end.
i grew up a voracious reader, but i do not know, at the end of a literature degree, whether that means i am destined or doomed to a career as a writer, or if it is simply a road that leads to a dead-end.
at the ripe age of 12, i thought i knew what i wanted to be. “an author,” i intoned, naively. but even then it seemed like a fantasy, not because i dreamed of it, but because i didn’t.
at 16, i thought i knew what i wanted to be. “a poet,” i said, silently, to myself, when even the more sensible part of me was not listening. then, and still, the whole endeavour felt like an imitation, a facsimile – i had constructed (or been duped into?) a theatre of the absurd, and i was the unwitting clown. all artists begin with imitation, i suppose, before they find their voice. they graduate from the amateur’s sport of mimicry. but pantomime was already familiar to me, in a way, because i had a lifetime of experience in performing the roles required of me in social settings, in friend groups. i was already well-versed in the art of imitation, the drama of performance. so maybe writing, for me, was just another kind of staged act, a theatre in a real sense that i could command rather than play an unwilling part in. perhaps my awareness of being an imposter stems from the always-present peril that my performance of something may get mistaken for the real thing, even by me. when does the mask you wear just become your face? maybe there is no “real” thing. the performance is the reality.
at 20, i no longer knew what i wanted to be. depression ate away my teenage years, a fact i realised only belatedly. but even that was not the germ of the dilemma.1 it is only now, in writing this, that i realise the search for the origins of my pain is futile. perhaps there is no origin, only pain and what you remember of it.
in any case, this is how i know the starving artist is a myth, a bald-faced lie. suffering does not inevitably make art more beautiful, more true, more virtuous. suffering is not the secret to artistic genius, which is a myth in itself. pain is not transformed into beauty through some magic trick that awes and inspires onlookers. what would have allowed my creativity to germinate, to flourish, was a sense of reprieve from my sorrows, a support system i could depend on, a patron saint that might have saved my poetry from the depths of despair, where nothing could grow. in the end, it was poetry itself that saved me from those depths, but if it were to go any further than that, anywhere greater, safer, and yes, more beautiful, it needed nurture and faith. it needed to feel necessary beyond the means of survival. audre lorde said poetry is not a luxury, so why does it feel like a luxury to me, a place i walked out of one day and, upon return, found myself irrevocably locked out?
do i want to be a poet? that question seems redundant in face of the fact that i do not consider myself one. i use poetry like a blunt instrument, running to it as a last resort when all else has failed, clinging onto it as if onto the hands of an indifferent lover. the greatest hypocrisy is feeling like i was spurned by something that never made any promises to me in the first place. i came to poetry as a means of externalising pain, and that was all it ever meant to me. now that i want it to be something more, i discover that my pen is dry when not inked by the fountain of pain seething within me. now that i want to rely on it as a source of hope, joy, tenderness, my voice abandons me. now that i’m in a place where i no longer feel like every day is a slow, tortuous step towards death, emotional and physical exhaustion take its place and i am left with a blank page onto which i have bled myself dry.
forgive me for not being gentler. forgive me for clutching to the page like a life raft, and once on shore, abandoning it. forgive me for lacking the instinct of a poet; it died alongside any notion i had about writing as a viable life path. i have no words left in me for the poetic, maybe because i do not believe in beauty anymore. i think you have to have some faith in the possibility of beauty in order to write at all, and i don’t know if i hold that possibility within me. the painless detachment of criticism is better. surer. more reliable, in the sense that you never labour under the delusion of being accepted or rejected based on the skill with which you elegise a bleeding heart, the precision with which you take a scalpel and prise apart your most secretly guarded feelings. hand on my stupid heart, as cameron awkward-rich says, and you can imagine through gritted teeth.
to be clear, i don’t think critical writing excludes emotion. i think emotion is vital to criticism, as it is to any other form of expression, because we are emotional beings. but i do think critical or so-called nonfiction writing is a different monster to poetry and fiction, and whatever skillset is needed for poetry, i do not have it. the possibility of cultivation is behind me, and beyond me, and i am finding this embarrassingly difficult to accept. 16-year-old me who understood poetry in a way 23-year-old me never could still fights ceaselessly against it. 14-year-old me who had yet to experience anything irrevocable fights ceaselessly against it. what do i say to them? you were right. you wanted to be heard. i’m sorry it wasn’t enough.
AFTER
my life is full enough that envy need not dig its heels in deeper. but it is not so full that i can stop looking behind my shoulder, sensing the apparition of another life forgotten, misplaced, unlived. the interminable drama of grief, which is a haunting.
sianne ngai has argued that “ugly feelings”2 – jealousy, discontent, bitterness – are socially and symbolically productive, and rather than reject them from ourselves and therefore from society, we can listen to them and try to understand what they tell us about our relation to the world. especially since systems of power are interested in culling these bad feelings lest they undermine their legitimacy – through union organisation, for example – it is important that bad feelings have a place in our social and emotional ecologies, enabling them to carry the potential of transformation, rather than remaining unacknowledged and therefore susceptible to manipulation by bad actors.
poetry is a place where bad feelings flourish; literature in general, i would say. writing can be a way to wean the poison from these feelings by transmuting them into another form, however shoddily that carrying-over may be done. the ability to conduct this transformation, the resources that are needed to do so effectively, are the stuff of artistry and the community it requires. suffering may not lead automatically to great art, but great art is often the result of a delicate dance between pain and possibility. i lament my own clumsiness in this process, not the process itself. i lament, too, the unwillingness to let this process render one vulnerable, so that one becomes soft and enlarged, a condition necessary for transformation to take place, both within the artist and the art itself. you cannot make yourself impervious to the world and be honest in your expression at the same time.
being well-versed in failure and the ill feelings that accompany it, i have come to appreciate art based on how openly it provides a space for woundedness, how generous the margins are, how willing the text is to allow pain to transform into something else, perhaps tenderness, perhaps love. how to make the light not as harsh? how to embrace darkness as it, in turn, embraces us? how do i create a poetics of failure, one that pulls belatedness into itself, one that carries pain and in that companionship, changes it, instead of forcing it to be something it’s not?
in other words, how do i go from being a failed poet to being a poet who deals with failure? this is the question i grapple with as a writer stranded between nonexistence and legibility. without a publication history, you languish in obscurity, which for an artist is a kind of social purgatory, analogous to that old adage, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? it’s a schrödinger’s cat situation – schrödinger’s poet.
i thought i couldn’t be a poet because i didn’t possess its gift. but isn’t poetry a form as old as time, accessible to everyone because everyone has spoken it, carved it, written it on scraps, expressed it in ways now lost to us? poetry is not an institution. just because i am not from, a part of, or heading to the institution, doesn’t mean i’m not or can’t be a poet. just because legitimacy requires a certain polish, professionalism, officiation, recognition, doesn’t mean writing that never sees the pages of a press isn’t “good” or real enough to be considered writing. instead of struggling to be accepted in this manner, i am attempting to let these inadequacies guide my senses, testing methods of shaping my words and worlds according to misalignment, unfit-ness, disappointment. this, too, is a process led by attention to failure, rather than a desire for success. i am learning and losing, learning to lose, and learning to let it speak through me in the best way it can. i am a poet of failure: always striving, never reaching.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.
you've captured many thoughts i've been having about poetry, lately, especially how it can be both a release for painful and complicated emotions in a way not found anywhere else and yet sometimes make those same pains worse. the glorification of pain as a way to reach truly 'beautiful' and 'meaningful' poetry can be a harmful one, and after all, 'meaning' in a capitalistic society is always tied in some way to what sells. Wonderful piece, many thoughts! <3