Poetics

“Before your fingers touch the keys,

you must first determine how you are going to play it.”

–Anton Rubinstein

Whoever you are reading this now,

             I write love letters to the unheard. A reaching, a calling of arms, a summoning, a shakedown, an upset, sailing through so much rough water. I am possessed by an involuntary devotion to speak for whoever remains silent. "Through me, many long dumb voices," Whitman writes, and I follow. Through me the hide and seek of children, the hushed sacrifices of parents, the orchestra of the well-glued assembly, the ignorance of the deserted, the frustrated cries of the oppressed. Each poem, each part of me, in some way a letter of compassion, of recommendation, of solidarity or preservation. Every work stepping first out of that place of love.

             If the line is not born out of withheld tears, I am not calling forth enough. There is enough suffering for that, to be sure, but it gets exhausting thinking this way. It may be difficult, but to quote Rilke, "almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious." However, turning anguish into a lasting song is worth the work. To crystallize the tempest into a graspable storm is a constant triumph, and is, more or less, the only reason I have ever written anything.

“When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets

             If my writing began as an earnest attempt to attain what I desire—has that changed? I continue singing, calling forth and out, showing my feathers, you could say, in a technicolor display of courtship, making my most viable bid, proving in roundabouts that I am worth keeping around, filling the silence with wakeful testimony, testing the waters of my life. I am not disturbed to let writing be struggle. As Noy Holland writes, “It is hard to want to seek it, this swelling around a wound.” Yet the swelling is all I know.

             I have no use for writing down secrets. Their flavor melts to dust on the page, so why bother. Inside me they are worlds of their own, but let out they become flimsy and lank, compressed to a few choice words, undercutting their significance. Every one of my words no longer belongs to me— therefore I trust no parchment with my unfiltered desire. I take the scenic route. I skirt around the rim of the void. Picking the scab that covers the wound. How weary and desolate my diary would be if I had one, frustrated with my evasiveness. I have no more need for one than I do for a changing room. My garments are hung on a public line, ensuring their modesty. Trusting no one's curiosity to be so aroused as to show up uninvited. I crowd my company with onlookers, who maybe look to me for no other reason than I look to them. Being friends with dreamers brings the deepest sleep.

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

             Writing puts me in a place where none may reach me, and for that I often stay as long as I like. For this reason it is difficult to write without acknowledging isolation. I think that, in a strange delicious twist, the words we depend on to communicate only ever come from a place of loneliness. Even writing in a crowded room, one withdraws so they might find the thoughts that pester them. After so much time scratching out my thoughts, I am no longer so sure. I have always prided myself on my honesty. Now I am honestly lost. What moves my hand from left to right may be mere habit, a typewriter of bone.

             Life is full of inadequacies, writing no different. What swells and blossoms in the brain as tapestry of sparkling sound wilts once exposed. It is like blood— a color indescribable until oxygen colors it familiar red— same as everyone's! It does little good to dwell on originality, for as long as it comes from you, it will mould itself after your individuality in the long run.

            After exhausting myself for so long, feeling so much, I set out to make use of my love. Love, a word so polarized it shies from serious conversation, and poets are warned at the outset of their journey to not abuse it— but I have set about to retrieve it from the commonplace mouths and sheath it in a wholly new scabbard. I am out to make love the national anthem. It occurs to me that such a bold, sweeping mission of life requires more than just words. It requires committing every faculty to carving out a better life. For my sake, the sake of those I love, and most difficult, for the sake of everyone I have yet to meet, who I save room for in my chest and on my page.

“It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meager?”

-Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

             In writing the love letter, or any letter, but one out of love especially, one navigates carefully through a labyrinth of memories to dislodge what is universally felt to be true. In this way, the letter goes beyond any individual recipient—the letter transcends target. The concept of target nearly made obsolete, for there is no way to know, once written, whether or not anyone has received the message. So it seems rarely worth the while to write anything targeted, though that itself is not enough of a deterrent. What often comes out instead can be humorously described as a ‘loose spray’ of affection. By channeling what rings true for all—or most, as is usually the case—I am able to write love letters that land in unexpected places.

“So you see why it doesn’t bother me to embrace Bad Poetry as the title of my first book. I could have called it Good Poetry, and I would feel no different. But I haven’t tried to write good poetry for a while now. I am only telling you how I feel and what I see. I am still learning how to do that. Yet no matter how much I concentrate my aim, I seem to always miss the mark. In this there is always a benefit, that no matter where the poem lands, it is still mine, as it first landed in my heart.”

-From Bad Poetry

             I wonder what it means to write in a world without any news. In my pedestrian journey, so much passes me by, and so much goes unheard. Would I have any desire to reach someone if I was not sure they were there? I hold names as well as faces—those nearest to me retain both, and it really is remarkable—worth so many remarks. They speak for themselves. When they do, I take great care to listen. For those out of my hearing’s reach, I listen even closer.
             What constitutes the unheard? Is it the ones unable to speak? Are they screaming the loudest, though nothing comes of it? Are they the limitless lives that are untried, the opportunities never followed, the journeys never surveyed? Yes. I know not what to say to them, except that I, too, am alive—and listening. I do not presume to know what anyone wants to hear. I can only speak for, and from, myself, hoping there is something that holds true beyond my body.
             In a reality that has abandoned facts, it is more important than ever to follow your truth. A dangerous sentence, I admit—no doubt that is the same advice that feeds into every hateful ideology. “Follow your truth.” We choose our truths and chase them even into darkness. Where we differ—we light the way with facts. Context illuminates and history shades. Any artist who has no desire to learn from the past is doomed to irrelevancy, a fate worse than death. We shoulder the burden of truth as much as anyone. Wish it were otherwise, but as the products of our time, we are compelled to create products for our time. Joan Retallack articulates this in “Essay as Wager”: “We must meet the contemporary moment on its terms—not in ignorance of history but in informed composition of it.” Not to say that fantasy or whimsy doesn’t have their place—yeah, they are probably more necessary than ever. But to quote Gabrielle Civil: “If you’re going to do kittens and rainbows, that’s fine—but do kittens and rainbows in the context of the world.”

             It is not the world alone we reach out for. If every one of my destinies received a body, each one desperately waiting to be touched, waiting in the wings for the possible scene demanding them. I write to them often, thinking of the sickening heights and valleys they dwell in. I am prepared at all hours for my life to dramatically change. So I write to mark where I now stand, before my surroundings become unsettled. I lull myself with lullabysmic harmonies. As witness to the crossroads of future and past, refining immeasurable emotion into the frame of a page— hard to call that anything other than victory. Not succumbing, but creating: not backing or breaking down, but embracing. I attempt, with sharp sincerity, to disarm what arrives well-armed, enchant what threatens to become disenchanted, and disrobe what wraps itself in nuclear charms. Seeking always to recreate what was lost— mourning what never will be found.

“Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile or commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity.”
-Rainier Maria Rilke

             What makes a love poem? What does a space of love look like? Does it mean some place furnished with pleasure? Does it mean writing poetry that is pleasurable? I admit that just as we discover what love means only to lose it again, so it goes with poetry. What it is and how it emotes me changes with seasons, with what house I occupy, with people that surround me. Yet no matter the condition, I know that great poetry follows close after genuine care. There is a reason the sour cynic is such a drag to listen to. The sound of sniveling draws no creature nearer, though in a tough world it may be in our nature to snivel. Therefore it is unnatural, defying nature, to care for those you have never met. It is a human quality that perplexes cold logic. For all that life demands from us, what beckons us to sound our songs in the direction that none may follow? What makes us so want to reach them?
             To write this way—to love this way— has its irreplaceable reward, but also heavily taxes the one that shoulders it. It is in many ways an imbalanced relationship, mirroring the relationship between reader and writer, in which one of us dominates the conversation. The silence is heartbreaking. My lines attempt to wrap like gauze around the cracks of swelling pressure. It is my medicine more than anyone’s, but I have seen to it that it is all-purpose. If there were any other purpose for me in this world, it has failed to reveal itself. Even when I falter, it has worked itself into my muscles so that I grasp the nearest instrument to articulate my trembling spirit. I never doubted that I am a poet—even when I have doubted to be fit to call myself Human and walk this Earth, as if functional. I play the part even when nothing feels aligned. My love letters to the world are less of distant admiration and more wistful wishing-it-were-otherwise.

             Yes, though sometimes the target burns brightly in my imagination, making me mad with the drift of impossibility, it rarely is the sort of letter meant to redirect affection my way. I am content with what loves me. What ails me is my own disconnect from the world I claim to love so much. I detach, detach, detach. Even when the wheels turn invariably in my favor, and my desires are somehow fully met, I wilt to think that my response would soon be: Is That All? In the immediate aftermath of such a thought: deep, disturbing dissatisfaction, and confusion over where to lay the blame. Is That All—my happiness? my pleasure? What are they for me but successful retreats from the inevitable end? Death compels love. I forget and remember each day.

             As others have done before me, I am laying myself out, “putting myself on the square,” as Whitman tells it, making these struggles so transparent that anyone might look through them and see themselves fogged at the other end. That, more than muscle memory or some innate desire to impress, is why I continue to sweat and shove with language. For myself as necessity. For others as potential—hope, faith, or the thought that someone loves them.

             I swear it is impossible for me to commit words to a page without feeling the weight of a commitment. Something in the act asks repeatedly, who is this for? Accepting myself as a given, what follows changes wildly depending on the tilt-o-wheel of circumstance. Oh yes, so complicated: now I channel Thoreau who urges me, “Simplify! Simplify!” Hypocrite. Haven’t I been trying?

             My friend Ryan reminds me, “Love is technical.” No doubt he’s right. Yet I find it best not to fuss over the politics and technicalities of love, and instead root myself to the present moment and go. It can be rationalized later. I am not long in this world—generally speaking. I stand on this speck in space lucky to have been suited with an education that allows me to forget I am learned.

“A narrative that uses the immediacy and incompleteness

of the present as a generator, a sort of pressure cooker, to render its details.”

-Renee Gladman, Emergence of a Fiction

             As the first stretch of my re-education nears its close, I feel closer still to the words entangling me, leaving me sometimes rasping and choking, often breathless. I begin to mourn well before the wake. Of the things I love, think I will never love anything more than language. I pity my future children, though at least I will be around, poking through books in the study. Oh, off I go—

              Brandishing the pen like the crooked finger of my love—off again I go. Digging myself deeper into the divide between every-man & no-man—tucked tail of my existence. Staying on the track, of course—on track of course—on the track of the course. Of course! How uncluttered our romance could be without worthless articles. Time chuckles at my keeping-together, sailing past.

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not.”
-Dylan Thomas

             To be in love—what is that? Is it safe? Is it familiar? Are these not the same nominations given respectfully to any thing that is boring? Is it then bold? Daring? Inventive? Why, yes—but the same can be said about evil. What is love but the delicate unstable concoction that brings the best of both? How are saints ever expected to fall in love? Ah, I hear you saying: but sir, it is said that saints love all they know, and save room for the ones not yet met! Fair and true enough, but that is another way to say that saints must really love no one in particular, for all the room they must keep. What kind of love am I even talking about? One day I might have a question I have an answer to. ‘Till then I keep chasing my tail.
             I will ask until someone answers me. What is love? Is it a biological luxury? Is it a cultural enterprise? I am weary of guessing but not so easily deterred. Is it fierce loyalty? Is it ferocious admiration? Is it mewing beneath the moon? Is it a mouthful of fireworks? Is it a handful of cattails? Is it the relinquishing of comfort? Is it the embrace of what-is? Is it always just out of reach? Is it accepting being out of reach? Is it a blockade, a siege, an armistice? Does it feed on enervating silence? Does it draw upon the all-before? Does it paint sky across a face? Does it sound like waves just before they crash? Does it adhere to the frame of a page? Does it stretch in vain, embarrassing itself with how far it goes? Would it chase the sun into its center? Does it get the privilege of naming itself? Does it decide when it ends? Does it hurt? Does it hurt? Does it hurt?

                                                                                                             love,
                                                                                                             kaleb (worst)