There’s a remove when presenting and discussing one’s own writing, and presenting poetry while discussing its mental and emotional composition strikes me as especially daunting. I think it requires ultra-subtle skill, frankness, and self-possession, qualities that I admire and find woven into this reveal about a secret art.
I’ve been interested in writing about writing for most of the time that I’ve been “Writing,” but I always find it presents a narrow space in which the voice is caught between the author and the version of the author on the page. I find the voice can become meta-authorial while becoming self-conscious of its own authority – to the point that I end up as confused as that sentence. I find that kind of mental/writing space somewhat constricting, or maybe “contracting” is what I mean to say….How to be your full self on the page while revealing the difficulties of constructing the self?
I see this question reflected in the first lines of “Where Contraction Dies” – “I have known the pain of contraction: / The squeezing into small places, / The desire to please, / To accommodate, / To make myself over / So that I’ll fit…” And I see myriad ways to finish this stanza, speaking to various experiences of assimilation and acculturation, invisibility and sight, and knowing yourself apart from others’ versions of you. Rather than focusing on poetry exegesis and the technicality of the craft, the piece itself is figured around the utility of poetry – its “chiseled quality,” its emotional lifts and ability to give a new form to “sharp edges” of life. In doing so, I think the piece reaches a point of universality by the time the last poem is introduced, defining a clear shape and purposeful development.
My final and most lasting impression of the chapter is that sense of self-possession, hard earned, conveyed through a voice that is firmly respectful of its own boundaries, which only serves to make the voice feel more alive. The full story of how one life’s events leads to such self-possession is 1) still happening and 2) regardless of genre, “private, as some writing must be.”
