i have been locked away in the dread dungeons of the ivory tower, surrounded by people who know more than me about anything that i could choose to talk about for pretty much the first time in my life. i have been working to become a better researcher and scholar. i have been mildly shocked to realize, for instance, how much information exists in the world, or the extent to which essentially every miniscule phenomenon to which i have ever given even a passing moment’s thought has been the subject of countless hours (years) of somebody else’s life, and their agonizing years of rumination and reflection probably exist in condensed form as a readily available book—or, at the very least, as a dissertation that could eventually be sent to me via inter-library loan.
This has affected my willingness to write my thoughts about a given topic in prose. i’m afraid to express a feeling or an opinion or a hypothesis about anything until i have read (or at least skimmed) at least a few of the more influential works in whatever the relevant field is. And i’m a grad student in linguistics, so i’m already devoting pretty significant tracts of time to figuring out what the literature has to say about any of countless linguistic phenomena, which leaves little time left over to research other things. (Incidentally, the more research i do in linguistics [the one field that i’m supposed to know a thing or two about], the more i realize that i don’t know the first thing about linguistics, which serves to do not-positive things for my confidence in dealing with other fields.) So ultimately, i find myself a little bit afraid to write about pretty much anything, because i know that i’m ignorant, and would probably recant whatever i had written if i were to do just a touch of research on whatever the salient issue may have been. It’s largely an issue of pride—i not only want not to be wrong, but i also want not to be obsolete or redundant.
That’s not as much of an issue with poetry. Poetry is supposed to be an art form—it mainly serves (or aims to serve) as an expression of beauty (or emotion, i suppose… probably not always beautiful, even when successful) rather than as a claim of truth. Beauty is a lot more flexible than truth, and a fair bit more subjective as well. A poet isn’t likely to be told that he’s wrong—unmoving, perhaps, but at least not wrong.
But laying aside the fact that it has been a bit of a struggle to write poetry at all lately, i find that even when i do write something, i am hesitant to make it publicly accessible. For a while, i was writing poems that were fairly opaque—they featured overwrought metaphors, long tangents that distracted from the main push of the poem, and indirect references to obscure events that i had noticed. They were basically incomprehensible to anybody who didn’t know what they meant. So people could read them and make of them whatever they wanted, and whatever they decided was perfectly fine with me—i knew what i meant, and that was enough for me. Perhaps sometimes i enjoyed to privately share to other people what i had meant, as well.
For whatever reason, i have found my style to be a little bit more raw, a little bit more transparent lately. This has made me hesitant to put recent poems in a public place—i’m generally disinclined to make my frustrations and strongest feelings property of the public domain. But again, the main reason for this is probably that i want to appear a certain way in public—self-confident, independent, etc. i’m not really those things, though, and there’s surely a strong element of pretense in any expression that i am those things. So this is pride, as well.
So i’ve come to realize that i’m too proud to write anymore. But i don’t think the answer is to not write. i’m far too proud for that.
Oh. And here are some pictures from when Cody Piersall and i hiked up Pawnee Peak a few weeks ago.
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