I’m doing something new this April for National Poetry Month. Throughout the next few weeks—maybe beyond, we’ll see—I’ll be sharing essays in response to poetry I’ve read. I don’t know how long they’ll be. I don’t know all the poems I’ll be responding to. I don’t know all the reasons, exactly, of why I’m doing this, but I do have at least one solid motivation: I’m facing a fear.
Through the voice of one her characters, Anäis Nin wrote in her elegant and earthy novel The Seduction of the Minotaur,
“If you take all your fears, one by one, make a list of them, face them, decide to challenge them, most of them will vanish.”
The “fear” of longer-form writing has plagued me, unusually, for several years. I don’t recall ever feeling the same sort of dread or doubt when I approached writing in high school or during my brief college stint. Honestly, I think I hadn’t read enough good work at either of those points in my life to be intimidated. Intimidation isn’t all bad. Despite our cultural praise of “confidence” (which, turns out, is simply a façade as often as it is a found strength), knowing when you’re out of your depth, or at least treading water, is an earned skill and a spore of wisdom.
I also have to give a semi-side-eye to this act of essentially talking about/detailing/adding more words to a piece of art that, at its core, exists to defy over-explanation. A poem stands up in the room simply to say something in its own way—it’s the length it is because that’s the length it took to say the thing. To heap more words on top can feel superfluous or redundant.
But I also know that reading the reflections on poetry and literature by others deepens my own appreciation of the art, provides additional insight or perspective, and stokes an internal conversation that extends far beyond the scope of the piece itself. To that end, and simply because I want to, I’m taking a stab at this exercise.
Etymologically, the word “essay” carries the meaning of testing an idea. Seeing if it will bear weight. Writing an essay is the scientific process of the literary realm. The essays I share will likely be a hybrid of text examination and personal reflections. Expository with a dash of narrative, if you will. We’ll have to see. This is an experiment, and we may all be surprised!
I recently met a local author during a Kishi Bashi concert (if you’re clocking this as an absolutely shameless flex—correct), and she had the most beautiful words to say about her writing process.
I asked why she wrote her book (admittedly not great form, but we were on a packed floor under a disco ball, waiting for the next act, drowning in strangers, so I was not at my conversational peak), and she responded that she wrote to better understand her own experience. Not just to have accomplished the act of writing a book—undeniably meaningful—or to “tell my story”—also valid and deeply important—but to make sense of her own living and encounters.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
–Joan Didion
And now we’re full circle. Personal writing is the act of better understanding yourself, including your fear, through testing whether your ideas bear weight and whether your self-defined experiences can fit the shape of language. This matters, because understanding and honoring the self is, counterintuitively, one of our primary keys to collective liberation. We are best able to understand, connect with, and cherish each other when we have a healthy relationship with our inner souls. This’s when our fears are acknowledged, tended, and tethered enough to not leverage all our inner attention away from the other and onto our own insecurities. Easier said than done, certainly; but ultimately, self-connection is the only way to re-dream viable futures for our children.
So consider this little April writing experiment part of that greater work of life, of building the freer, truer, more synergetic world we all deserve. It all belongs. Thank you for joining me.