Ever since 2017, I've been working on and off on the manuscript of a full-length poetry collection. It's nearly done and I'm excited to turn that work into a physical book that I can publish. What follows isn’t a cogent reflection on what barely qualifies as a creative process, but the fumes I’m running on while my little engine crosses this last mile.
Shortly after Donald Trump became president, I saw flare-ups and bursts of desperate insistence regarding the power that poetry allegedly holds in periods of crisis. In the face of the irrational, the prosaic fails and the poetic steps up to meet the challenge sideways. Not sure what the basis is for this, but it made intuitive sense, for language to win by assuming untameable shapes.
So, y'know, people talked about living happily during the war, and the soft animals of their bodies, and the memory of chilled tofu. This is just something we do. We scavenge little pieces of beauty and cup them in our hands and show them to others, like children collecting smooth rocks. Not untameable shapes. Even given deliberate attempts to complicate language, the mind gravitates to the simplest and easiest frameworks.
What does your body mean to you? And how do other bodies figure into your life?
I can't identify my triggers but I know how it feels when my body reacts to one, so I go on a walk. That's one strategy. I go on a walk and there's less noise and there's more space for words to move around.
What else helped… I listened to Bark Your Head Off, Dog by Hop Along and Saved by Now, Now a lot. Those two records have an acupunctural effect on me whenever I’m trying to pinpoint a feeling. I’m pushing my 30s, which means I’m getting less hustle content and more burnout self-care content on my FYP, the teachings of which I’ve happily applied by taking breaks that lasted for whole months. Growth is non-linear and I’ve got other shit going on. I went from making a little time for people I care about for making a lot more time for people I care about. I drink way more coffee now, which is bad. But I don’t drink alcohol anymore, which is good. While I was unemployed I ran and ran a crazy amount. I read more electronic books than physical books. I went to therapy for a little while. Not long ago (I think I mentioned this in a previous post) I read a book entitled “Formations” by Carissa Pobre, which sort of takes a syncretic approach to tackling the pandemic through the self-help genre and the diary form. It’s a good book, you should read it!
Realizing that growth is non-linear allowed me to commit modest chunks of energy to other creative projects. Between 2017 and now, I released a couple of zines: one called “RATTLING VOID” which I sold a few copies of (though I plan on eventually putting up a soft copy version for free) and “extinction burst,” a zine about loneliness and apocalypse anxiety that Mags and I worked on together, with her masterfully handling the visuals of the object, and me just kind of faffing about with block text. I recently had a few poems of mine published in the latest issue of TLDTD and the debut issue of Ilahas Journal. I’m very proud of those.
And this thing? This thing I’ve had in the oven for five years (though it seems like more)? Lotta wounds in this thing. Lotta grief. It was not and is not a cathartic process. It is entirely possible, and expected, for you to keep living with a thing even after you’ve articulated it perfectly.
It's redundant to talk about how poetry solves nothing. It's hot air. It's like asking a prayer to look into a microscope. Other fields of study are for problem-solving. But I think this book is pretty good. My intention is for people to have fun reading it. Fun is the aesthetic objective.
These three essays in the latest issue of Out of Print are fantastic.
My fave track from the new Adele record, fuckin’ shattered me
She drew millions of TikTok followers by selling a fantasy of rural China. Then politics intervened
Follow Transmasculine Philippines! It’s an account that does a lot of great work informing people about the trans masc experience and allyship! Cis people, you wanted sources, here they are!
I finally did it, y’all. I’m watching Critical Role. The first two campaigns are just too much for me to catch up on. Starting with the latest.