[poem] seek & ye shall find//how i read poems

[kaberett]

[Actually kind of gory. Also, as ever, a draft; please feel encouraged to offer feedback.]

Memory has about it a certain trembling tautness, and
poetry resides in the interstices between breath
and voice, heart and tongue. To let it out, we peel
away our selves, layer by layer, page by page, until
it is revealed-- the butchered, fire-seared fragments of
the stories of our lives. We take the holes within ourselves and
pour them out on paper, in pools of ink, and fill whole
volumes with our varied emptinesses. Reach out,
leaf through and find: your bloodied raw unfinished self
held close within these circling cloth-card arms.

Comments

[kaberett]

The very first draft - the 2am scribble on a scrap of paper - had "books" in place of "volumes"; I now realise I actually want it to be "anthologies", but need to work out how to make that sit easily, in terms of meter, with "whole" -- which I also want to keep, because of the echoes with/in "holes".

[wild_irises]

"collections" might work better than "anthologies." Or not.

[kaberett]

Hmm. Good call; I will think about it. It's definitely better meter-wise, but I think it's less obviously book-related?

[wild_irises]

I thought about that. It's book-related to me, but then I'm a professional. I decided that I thought it might be book-related enough for a non-professional in context. But it is not my poem.

[kaberett]

I suspect part of the issue with me not reading it as inherently and strongly book-related is that I've recently read Twelve Collections And A Tea-Shop, which is a collection of stories about collections that aren't stories. So! Something to mull over, and thank you lots, again, for the suggestion :-)

[fyreharper]

:headtilt: libraries? although that's another order of magnitude larger than anthologies...

[jelazakazone]

I have nothing critical to add at the moment, but I love the images you evoke here. It just totally works for me.

I find it so interesting that you easily embody both science and art -- I mean, not only embody, but perform? Think it? Words have fled me. I am hoping they will return to me some day.

[kaberett]

I have a very great many feelings on the topic of science as creative and beautiful and breath-taking, in the same way that any other endeavour has the capacity to be. And as is probably also obvious from my poetry this year, I am having a similarly large number of feelings around safety, and creating spaces, and the tensions between the oblivion of being unrecognisable, invisible, erased -- and the vulnerability of being legible, of having one's heart upon one's sleeve.

So. Yes. Bodies as palimpsests of personal histories. It's a theme I keep coming back to, at the moment, but it's something I've been playing with for years.

ETA: and in this particular poem, I am also playing with the personal resonance of Walcott's Love After Love: Feast on your life; and of how committed I am to paying it forward, whatever "it" may be; and of how whole it makes me feel to see people fed & safe.

Notes on things I am definitely changing in the next draft

[kaberett]

"until/it is revealed" -- doesn't want to have "it" repeated again; it's not quite "all is revealed", but that word needs swapping

"in pools of ink" --> "pools of ink", I think, for meter and alliteration