| My Dear SirrahI recently wrote an essay/letter for one of my more advanced fiction classes and liked the unedited version so well I decided to post it here. It's rather long--nearly 2,000 words!--and chances are that you probably won't get the entire weight of it since it lacks the context and it's addressed to a specific audience whom is only referred to as sir. However, I liked it and decided that my xanga looked a little empty. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Dear Sir, Despite being the “young classic over-achiever” (or was it a “classic young over-achiever”? I can’t recall), I’ve decided to take a risk and write my essay in letter format. For no particular reason, it just felt right me—I couldn’t even imagine writing this paper any other way. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for the imprudence and find my unusual formatting wildly creative. If not, I’ll call it a rough draft, profusely apologize in an attempt to gloss over my embarrassment, drag myself off to lick my wounds and write a half-hearted standard essay. Here’s hoping for the best. Though I am remarkably fond of poetry’s etymologic origins—the word originally comes from the Greek poiesis, “making” or “creating”—I have no love for the craft. Its magic seems to be perpetually eluding me, the right words, phrases and ideas always just a bit out of my grip. You know that poetry is-not-has-not-and-will-not be the greatest love of my life. I find the concept of verse’s meter, symbolism, and assonance, absolutely impossible. The idea of writing and yet not telling some sort of a story absolutely baffles me to the extreme. Storytelling is the art that I love best—it’s something that I want to spend my life chasing after. I could easily tell you a story about anything—a girl, a shoe, an ant. But trying to write poetry is like turning my world upside down, drowning me in a muddy puddle, and poking me with a fork. Very unpleasant, sir. It’s really no wonder I don’t pen out more poetry than I do. I admit that there are shards of poetry that seduce me—I’m hopelessly in love with Milton, Poe, and Graves—but as a whole, I find it to be most disagreeable. And, by most disagreeable, I mean that I find my poetry most disagreeable. Other people’s poems are perfectly fine, if not a bit rosy and posy for my tastes, but I enjoy them with increasing frequency. The sentiments expressed by the poetry of others astounds me—shocks me!—thrills me!—to the point where I’m willingly riffling through books of poetry, absorbed and happy, curled up with my crutches and tea, lost in translated words and the vague scent of old paper and ink. Quite frankly, that was something I did not expect from this semester—despite your engaging teaching skills I doubted your ability to convert me to a patron of the poets. I must both congratulate and thank you for the rather forced introduction—you’ve launched me into an entirely new society of literature that I’m sure I’ll now forever and helplessly be enraptured with. I’ve complained my bit about what I loathe, but perhaps I should finally concede what I love about the verse. The thing that strangles me so often in my own poetry is actually the thing I love it for the most—poetry is both part of and yet completely separate from the storyteller’s heart—it’s broken prose, carefully placed in a mosaic of precise words and sinewy rhythm. Sometimes poems tell stories and sometimes they don’t. Poetry isn’t bound by the same rules that perhaps inhibit prose—it’s free to move in ways that a short story or a novel would never dream of, the movement of sharp expressions and nonsensical phrases, the clever play of words. It treads on ground that I have not yet begun to dream of. Despite my prejudices against the art, I can’t help but grudgingly love it for its wildly fanciful nature and wandering curiosities. Another attraction I have is that verse is a subjective talent—there really is no “bad” poetry, despite the awful monstrosities that seem to litter the internet, insipid tragic things that bemoan the horrors of adolescence—because poetry has no standard of bad. While I personally may not be fond of the insipid tragic moanings of a preteen, perhaps to someone out there, those moanings are the works of geniuses. Likewise, some people like Whitman—I do not, but that certainly doesn’t mean that his poetry is “bad.” Poetry can’t be judged by the standards that we use in mainstream fiction, as it doesn’t follow the rigid rules of a story line or even basic coherency. A brief look at a few free verse poems will assure you that poetry doesn’t always make sense. Whether the florid sonnets of Shakespeare or the bawdy limericks of Edward Lear, a wonderfully peculiar thing about poetry is that, ultimately, poetry is prose in motion. It’s not written for the masses that thoughtlessly consume and crush stories, but for only those who seek it out, whether between notes of music or bound by page and word. Poetry has a distinct and collective audience—an audience that purposefully seeks it out. Prose can be anywhere—advertisements, academic texts, bills, or best yet, academic bills—but poetry needs to be sought out (unless, of course, you feel that music is poetry set to audible rhythm, but that aspect will be pointedly ignored in this letter). Unfortunately, in its classic, standard form, I do feel that the verse is a dying art. In a society of mass production and cookie cutter art, poetry is simply too time-consuming. It requires energy and motivation to write and revise, to agonize over and to carefully measure. Poetry isn’t a neat rhyme set to a pulsating beat—poetry is a silent symphony, each stanza the groanings of an articulate orchestra. Any idiot can cough up a story or an essay (though the quality may be less than desirable), but it takes work to write poetry well. Truly, the romanticized outlook on poetry—the dreamy sighs, the impassioned scratching pen against paper, masterpieces written by candlelight—is a big fat farce. Like all writing, poetry is an art that can be studied but never mastered. Lifetimes can vainly be spent attempting to reach the poet’s nirvana, an immortal masterpiece to resound throughout the ages, without success, lost in a dribble of trite ditties. Poetry is, in my relatively uneducated opinion, something that needs to be crafted—an art that is designed and built with meticulous care, lovingly (loathingly?) revised and agonized over. It is not an easy art, and because of that, I admire the poets fervently. Having said my piece about poetry in general, I feel obligated to speak about my own childish art. You’ve always seemed very optimistic towards my poetry—even when I felt my most cynical towards it—and the concept still both amuses and yet confounds me. I so often feel that I stumble through poetry like a drunken tiny Tim, hobbling blindly towards what I think it’s suppose to be like—which is, ultimately, my biggest problem. We’ve discussed in class, to an extent, the fact that children more easily write poems than adults and I feel that’s because they don’t have any expectations of their own work. They write poetry for the sake of writing poetry, not comparing themselves to the literary world at large, but simply for their own satisfaction and amusement. That’s something that eludes me—I write insecurely, all too aware of triteness and clichés and poetic failings—all too aware of the veteran poets before me, looming in splendor and immortality. Filled with self-doubt, I lurch through what I think poetry was and is and strives to be, not allowing myself to express the sentiments that I truly want to compose. Though I don’t know how to remedy it, I know instinctively that this is where much of my problems come from. You once told me, glasses sliding down your nose and very serious, “You will write bad poetry.” And I have—and will continue to do so—much to my dismay. I know that until I grow and mature to the point where I’m okay with writing bad poetry (awkwardly adolescent phrasing and underdeveloped ideas included), and until I get to the point where I’m writing for my own satisfaction and no one else’s, I will continue to stagnate on this level of juvenile slobber. The only cure I can fathom is simply time—time and education of the art. It’ll take time for me to learn the language of poetry and perhaps even more time to decide what I really feel strongly enough about to poeticize. I know I’ve tried to be humorous throughout this letter, but in the uttermost seriousness, I really am… uncomfortable, with poetry. There’s something very raw about it, at its core, a naked honesty that gets under my skin and leaves me fidgeting. There are sentiments that I’m just not ready to express yet, things that I know—know in the back of my mind, hidden under the wooly blanket of my conscience—would make incredibly engaging poems. But I’m not ready to be honest. I’d rather write neat, pretty essays and quirky stories with weird titles than pen poetry that reveals a fragment of something sacred or taboo or something I’ve locked away. I’ve said many things in my writing which I would not say in person, but poetry… for me, poetry feels like a sacred language of secrets. Out of every poem that I’ve given you, only Madame Rosa has held a secret and out of every poem that I’ve given you, it’s been Madame Rosa that both you and Levi liked best. (It’s still burnt into my mind, Levi leaping over the melting snow banks and loping towards me after the meeting I’d given him the poem. He was waving it around wildly, his trench coat flapping out behind him like some lanky vulture, hopping and fluttering, clomping towards me, crying, “Mandy, I love it! I love it! It’s wonderful!”) But I am young, sir, and have not gathered many secrets and those I have, I’m not ready to disclose. In time, I think I may become the writer you so optimistically aspire me to be—but not yet. Not yet… In time, but not now. For now, I’ll write pedestrian poetry and work on learning the language of the poets, studying and listening, attempting to replicate their greatness, waiting and growing silently. I feel terrible for admitting this, but I don’t expect another poem of Madame Rosa’s caliber within the confines of this semester. Of course I will try and I will work hard—stretching my skills and struggling through this language I still don’t understand—but I have no high expectations, resigned to using this class as a stepping stone, as a period for growth and not accomplishment. I know this letter has been an academic risk—not to mention rambling at times and perhaps a tad confessional, but such is the natures of letters—and I’m grateful for the creative liberty you’ve granted me. I can only hope that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do—that in this starkly informal and impertinent note, lurking both in the words and between the lines, you find a monologue of sorts, a snapshot of Mandy at eighteen: insecure and wildly indecisive, snarky and proud, a lover of loop-holes and etymology, a despiser of bad grammar and weak convictions, a chaser of immortality and a writer of dreams. So tell me, Professor, did my risk pay off? -Mandy In other news, I have a fractured knee cap. |
