So I hit poem 90 on this blog... I am having a bit of a crisis of purpose. This is sort of independent of the generally low quality of work I've been producing throughout reading/finals period. Part of it is being rejected by publications both on and off campus, I'll admit. I mean, part of the problem is that poetry is in a lot of ways subjective. I think really good poetry is easy to distinguish and really bad (and even pretty bad or just bad) poetry is easy to distinguish but sometimes it's hard to tell what's mediocre or borderline bad and what's better and what's genuinely good. And what I'm trying to say is being a poet is something intricately bound with having an audience (it's, you know, the bardic art still, even if modern poetry has departed from that in a lot of ways) and so what people think of this stuff matters to me, even if ultimately (given that it's work that's not likely to be published) I am the only one to whom this stuff is really salient. And, you know, I've heard a lot of really harsh judgment of poetic work lately that I thought was pretty good, and it's just made me question a lot of the fundamental assumptions I bring to the table. Picking such an audaciously performative medium to promulgate my daily poetry, a lot of which I will freely admit is not, you know, up to par, means that I feel particularly vulnerable to criticism... which I definitely want, but, like every poet, harbor mixed feelings about... what I'm basically saying is, I'm pretty afraid that this blog is adding up to fundamental suckage &/or worthlessness as a poet, which is something I would very much like to avoid. But at any rate. This is a long introduction to a poem that... does not break the trend of mediocrity, shall we say. Guys, I swear there will be a streak of better stuff -- I have big hopes for J Term.
Sallow kid weeps under a plastic shade.
A man's arm skews in sleep
braced on the pole where the men who dance
on the trains flip with their caps out.
On the platform, frigid wind
scabs my knees. They step out too
still blaring MJ. I huff gusts
of air rough with coming snow.
My mother told me I was too weary
even to weep when I left her thighs--
my sharp-chinned sisters wailed.
The sick odors of the city, lights
dulled by cold,
by heavy waters. Wind
pelting its briars at me.
They moonwalk to keep warm
to dulcet MJ, hats
at their feet,
so the lights of the oncoming train
can drench the brims.
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Talia, stick with it. I wish I were a better reader (and a better friend) and had been reading daily all along. But even the people around you who don't read every day appreciate and understand it for what it is, expecting no more or less than the difficult—there's no other word for it—"thing" that is writing a poem a day. Sometimes the dough for the bread rises, and sometimes it doesn't. But the bread finds its mouth eventually. (Boy, that was a tortured metaphor.) Anyway, I'm basically telling you to keep it up, even when it seems like no one's paying attention. Poetry is born of things muttered on unaccompanied walks.
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