Words on Walls

This week, I was struck once again by the chaos of writing first drafts.  For me, first drafts of poems have always been full of scribbles and arrows and substituted words.  I’ve learned to try my best not to stress about the quality of writing coming out when I first set words down on paper;  instead, I concentrate on identifying the themes and questions that are rising from the writing.  Often, all that remains from the first draft when I finish a poem is a few lines, but nevertheless, I need to put in the time to sit down and find those lines..  One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, explores the importance of less-than-perfect first drafts in her book Bird By Bird:

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

In light of her advice, I find myself excited rather than anxious when a first draft like the one below comes into being:

Coincidentally, the poem that came out of the scraps of paper pictured above came from my reflections on writing the other poems in my distinction project.  Here it is (as of now!):

At First

At first, words came

Slowly: crept out to dance on the crests

Of my fingertips, on the lines of my lips

Then fled to shadowed corners when I reached out

To catch them, to hold them

I fled too.

To desolate spaces where I could

Whisper somethings without substance

Where silence came easily

And I let it settle in because I was certain

There was nothing of worth to say

Then, just as dust began to film every hope, every thought

The words emerged or maybe

Returned

From his glance across the road

From her hummed harmonies

From our midnight conversations

Words for him: the one working two jobs

With toddler twins waiting

At home on a sun-flooded porch

And for her, who crafts notes so piercing

Her melodies bring down strongholds

And him who makes walls his stepping stones

To launch into worlds where nothing

Can hold him to the ground

Not gravity

Not weakness

Not fear of falling

So, if you rest here awhile

I will try to

Spread out words like laundry

So they will have space to dry

Space to breathe

Into the desolate spaces

You will see:

They are made to catch the light

To catch your breath

To bring down strongholds with a song

28 November 2011

Because I have always wanted this project to focus on Durham and Belfast, I have been trying to redirect my writing once again to those places.  In the past week and over the next several weeks, I hope to capture more precisely the reasons why Durham is so important to me and the ways that I see the themes of walls and borders playing out in this city, both in exploring recent experiences and by returning to earlier poems on the topic.

This year I am tutoring at SEEDS Garden, an organization that provides after-school supervision for elementary age students.  This week I’m including a poem that looks back on one afternoon when we decided to take the day off from school work to play in the garden outside.

With Stephanie, In the SEEDS Garden

And what about the hedges of a garden

Are they walls too?

If so, then they are a good kind of wall and

Today, they hem us in:

You, with the same name as my mother but with

A different laugh, a different way of holding yourself

And me, clasping your hand

Asking about your scratches and your schoolwork.

Together, behind living walls, we are safe

From kids on the playground and

Doctors on the phone

From boys sitting on the same bench who are

Maybe serious, maybe only teasing this whole time

We are safe from their words, their thoughts, even

Which ricochet off these walls of leaves and wood

Ricochet off into the coming dusk

And we are glad of it.

Now, we are safe enough to tumble into fall.

You drag me to your pumpkins (they are your favorite,

Even these ones, so small and lumpy)

Then I chase you to the tallest tree

Which you climb and climb until

I call to you; until you laugh and swing down,

Brushing my arm and looking up at my eyes in a single second

Holding them with your own,

(The darkest brown, the same as mine), then

You are running again and

Pulling me with you and

We are running again.

15 November 2011

This past week, I received some very helpful feedback from the members of my At Home/On the Wall independent study.  We talked about the poems and short stories that I have written thus far, mostly exploring which pieces they liked or disliked and why they felt that way.  I was surprised in some cases; a few of the pieces I felt the most sheepish about  were those they appreciated the most and vice versa.  There was a lot of discussion of when voice is “convincing” or “authentic” and when it is not.  My classmates and advisors generally recognized and confirmed that I was having difficulty speaking through other voices—for example, from the perspective of a resident of Belfast or Israel.  Instead, my independent study members agreed that the pieces that were most eloquent or interesting were those in which I spoke from my own perspective.  I’m not quite sure what to do with this problem, or whether it really is a problem.   On one hand, it seems entirely natural to speak with the most ease in your own voice.  Also, I often want to speak the most in my own voice.  There is a lot to process at Duke and many aspects of life here that I find quite relevant to my thesis topic of walls and borders.  On the other hand, I have so much respect for writers who can slip seamlessly from one voice into another and I would love to develop this ability.  I know that it will take time as well as a lot of effort (both in writing and rewriting as well as simply becoming a more acute observer of everyday conversations and speech patterns/dialect).  Still, I think that having a versatile voice in my writing is certainly something to strive for in the long run.  However, as I start to think about pulling together a collection of pieces from the portfolio, I think that I will tend to select very sparingly from the poems that are not in my own voice.  In this case, they just seem to have less of a place in the project than the others.

On another note, I’ve been able to play around with the new camera that I got for this project a few weeks ago.  Fall at Duke is such a beautiful time to take pictures, so I’ve been able to use the scenery as an opportunity to experiment with the various settings on the camera in preparation for taking photos of the people I interview as well as of my trip to Israel over Winter Break.

One of my friends recently made a joke about how when you’re writing a thesis, all of the themes and considerations of your topic begin to surface in your daily life, dominating your thoughts and sometimes even your dreams.  This gets interesting for her, as she is studying the Jesus movement of the 1970s.  While I haven’t experienced the same sensation of living in another era of someone writing a history dissertation, I do find the themes of walls and borders manifesting themselves in my experiences.  Sometimes it’s only in minor conceptual associations (thinking of social distinctions on my college campus as figurative walls) but I’ve also begun to see a variety of human experiences through the lens of landscapes and the boundaries between places.

In particular, I’ve found the notion of shifting setting to reflect mood to be an emerging theme in my writing.  For my final project for my Asian American Theatre course, my professor allowed the students to choose between critical essays or creative pieces.  Thinking that I could seize the opportunity to explore dramatic writing as an alternative to poetry, I jumped at the opportunity to draft a short play.  The result (still in the works) chronicles the experience of a Japanese-American teenager transported back to various landscapes to interact with her projections of her ancestors (heavily influenced by her exposure to American portrayals of Asia in pop culture).  I’m not sure yet whether the themes of this project will intersect enough with my thesis to allow me to add it to my portfolio without endangering the integrity and cohesion of the project.  Regardless, seeing how my various creative projects overlap and intersect has been confusing, encouraging, and refreshing.