Dazed In The Life

Ok, so it’s been a long time since I blogged, and for that I am sorry. No, please don’t beat me. I have simply been attempting to recover my sense of awareness. What sense of awareness? you say. Well, the sense of awareness that I have a college degree to earn by the end of this year, and a life to attempt to plot out beyond that.

I’m not convinced that previous sentence is entirely grammatically correct, a fact which does not bode well for my BA in English Literature.

Anyway, I have also been attempting to find a way to put into words exactly how delighted I was by the election of Barack Obama. The previous post kind of took lots of other people’s words, mashed up a bit of a collage and avoided having to express anything myself beyond the implications of this conglomeration. I’m still not able to go beyond “It’s wonderful”. I’m waiting for the inspiration to verbalise the inspiration of it all.

Usually, when I can’t express something to my satisfaction, I flee to the infinitely more pliable regions of poetry, where you can indirectly say whatever the hell you want to but can’t say directly. Ah, you say, there was bound to be a catch, he couldn’t be all politics and sport, he couldn’t be that cool. Poetry, it makes sense. Well, yeah, basically, I’m a coward – I hide meaning in rhymes. Like a closed book, you won’t get to see what’s inside, you’ll only get a flashy blurb which drops a few hints.  

I dip in and out of reading poetry, and some resonates with me and some doesn’t. The poetry that resonates with me most is the poetry I write myself. Not because I’m conceited and think it’s literary gold, but because it captures moments and emotions which I felt and can feel again, which are released upon rereading the poem. Well, that’s the basic idea anyway – I think it’s practically impossible, but a great theory. Basically, I like poems for themselves, as beautiful pieces of writing, but I also like being able to understand poems and the poems I understand best are the ones I wrote myself. Na-na-na-na-na, I get it and you don’t.

Well, no, that’s not the point either. Because I like people to read the odd poem of mine now and again and to like them and to say those magic words “I really connected with it” – except that sounds so pretentious, so maybe the more magic words “It struck a chord with me” or “I feel that way sometimes too”. And they don’t know exactly everything behind the poem – they don’t have to. All they need is to find something in those words I have arranged which rings a bell for them.

I took a 6-week course in creative writing last year and was told by the lady running the course that “we need to eradicate that ‘I’ from your poems”. What? I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite heard that. (That’s three Is in one sentence, so she was clearly fighting a losing battle). What she explained to me was that the poet should not be so intrusive as to dominate a poem through constant Is and Mes. Metaphor, she enthused, it’s all about the metaphor.

Metaphor me arse.

Ok, not too poetic and not what I think at all. I loves a good metaphor, I does. But the thing is this. I don’t see any reason to expunge myself from what I write. Most of my poems are about me. Or things I did. Or things I saw. Or things I think. And if I want to express these things through a nice extended metaphor, fine. But if I want to be there, in the poem, while all these things are happening, that should be fine too. I’m a big believer in the power of storytelling, and if the best way – or, sometimes, the only way – to tell a story is to use that poetic Me, then nothing’s going to stop me telling it.

This all sounds terribly egocentric. Maybe it is. Actually, yes, it definitely is. All about me, me, me. But that’s what art often is – not that some of the scrawlings that vomit from my pen are art. But art needs an artist. Some of the best poems - and song lyrics too – are brimful of Mes and Is. And that doesn’t stop other people from “connecting” – after some period of buffering, presumably. But there are no cries of “out of the way, poet, I can’t connect with you there” or “if only this were completely metaphorical and bereft of the word I, then there might be a chance of an emotional spark being lit within me”. 

I think most people have a Poetic Me – or I, more appropriately. Most people have a side to their personality that finds a certain wonder in unexpected snowfall, in spotting the Plough among the stars, in walking on the beach at sunset, in singing in the rain, in a kiss. Some people just hide it more than others. And some of us let it out for the occasional wander among the words of a poem. I’m not ready to see Me put down just yet.