On trying to become poet.

I haven't written on here in sometime, but I promise to get better about that. This blogging thing is even newer for me than some other forms of expression...I think so many of us have this self doubt that our ideas really matter that much, are really expert enough. For years I even found it too egotistical to keep a journal. Near the end of high school, I finally started writing in one, but it wasn't until halfway through college that the words I wrote were my own. Up until then, I merely wrote quotes I liked, or half-thoughts.

Even when I first began writing, the prose didn't fit me. I found I was not very good at being brief but I was too busy to write it all out. Still, I found a lot of relief writing my responses to lines I had heard here and there in movies, from friends, and in songs. The first time my heart was broken, I didn't realize how upset I was until this Ani Difranco song Dilate came on in my car and I sat there and sobbed. I am not a crier but for the first time, I refused to repress myself and I didn't feel guilty for being upset. I went home and I wrote out the words to the song. Then I made myself journal about how each part had triggered something about this heartbreak I was feeling and eventually, I wrote about how I planned to grow from my pain.

Still, it was not until I began writing poetry that I really got great use out of this journaling thing that I was trying. The first poem I ever wrote was my senior year of college. I was trying to expand myself. I had spent much of college with the same group of people and I wanted to try and develop this artistic side of myself. This side that I had somehow convinced myself I wasn't allowed to have.

Wake Forest (where I went to undergraduate) was having an erotic poetry slam. This was incredibly brave for Wake. I thought to myself, I can do this. I will write a poem and I will read it out loud. I was in this time where I was trying to think more about what I believed about sex and eroticism. I was acting in the Vagina Monologues. Also, a professor, Eric Watts (if you go to Carolina take him, he could change your life) had mentioned that we no longer understood erotic love as a culture, that we associated it too much with erotica. Anyway, so I had been thinking about that for a few weeks and I wrote "Touch My Face."

I was so nervous. I wore my favorite coat, the green one that is plaid that I bought in NYC. It was hot as hell in the campus coffee shop but I kept the coat on. After I read, these two frat guys came up to me and told me they really loved it, that was bizarre but great because I think they so much embodied what I was afraid of that night. That poem appears following this post.

When I moved to DC, I regularly attended this open mic at Busboys and Poets. Everytime I said next time I would bring my book and I would read. Everytime I forgot it. When I moved back to the District for the summer I said I would read before the summer ended. Miraculously, I found excuses not to go to the open mic or I forgot my journal. The poets were beautiful. Their rhthyms were not all consistent, something you often find in spoken word, but really felt organic to their beings. Their work varied as well. I am still learning that you don't have to consider youself good to put your shit out there. You do however need to be real with yourself and that makes it really hard to read or write in a public space. Because the walls come down. My friend Reagan and I were talking about writing tonight and he noted how we think we are this one identity and then we are surprised when what we put on paper is different from that. This poetry stuff has shown me just how constructed our day to day identities can be, how sometimes we are constantly unconsciously selecting from our list of identities as we perform ourselves.

My poetry is raw, passionate, and a little vulnerable. It is less explicite than I expected from myself. But what are our expectations of ourselves anyway other than what we think we should be to fit into others' views of us? The second poem I am posting tonight I read at the open mic last week at Wake Forest. I initially just went to listen but I took my book with me as a way of repenting for my past sins. I was terrified again, a terror that certainly did not dissipate when several friends showed up. I had hoped to be annonymous and had told no one that I might read. The majority of my friends do not even know I write poetry. I think it might be that we want most to maintain our well-contructed images for our friends, maybe only more so for our former lovers.

So here goes, I have several other poems and I love all of them. But, it is aprocess for me to dismantle my walls. I like the dillusion that people think I am a badass so it is hard for me to be vulnerable. Be careful with me.