This is a love letter. This is my manifesto to the written word. My sacrament to language. I am hopelessly in love with the sound of words.
I don’t remember writing as a child, but I do remember reading and the vastness and awareness of worlds I would discover within books. Reading made me a more brazen dreamer. It gave vibrancy to my thoughts. And it led me to view the world in a different way. To me it’s no coincidence the word “word” is only one letter shy of the word “world”. I remember my first writing class as teenager. I was fourteen. I remember where I sat in the classroom. It was always the second seat of the second row on the far left side of the room. Miss Appino had medium length, curly, strawberry blond hair and most noticeably she walked with a limp. One of my classmates told me that she was missing all of the toes on her left foot and that was the reason for her hobbling. I never questioned it. She was quirky and manic. She went off on tangents about hyperbole and the unquestionable difference between simile and metaphor. I loved her passion. I wanted to soak in words and the way she described them was a like a warm bath. Miss Appino changed my life. She was the first person to recognize that there was value in the way I saw the world. I wrote my first poem in her class. I poured over each word. It took me four hours to write an eleven line poem. I still remember it by heart. She gave me a ten out of ten on that assignment, but that day the lesson was in the doing. From that day forward I consumed words. My heart had been opened to poetry. Like Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry”, words were my food and I was a hungry wandering dog, constantly on the prowl, constantly seeking to satiate. Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark. I leave that poem every time delighted by how playful language can be. How adeptly Strand pushes the personification all the way to the edge of the poem and leaves us there, believing he is this wild animal incarnate. Each word unfurls with ease; the rhyme, both recognizable and ambiguous, both accessible and cerebral. The form is so simple, the language so direct. Poetry taught me to see the world from an eyewitness lens. I became a forensics expert on moments and what I could glean from any given experience at any given time. My brain, a sponge of visuals that I felt compelled to index and was incapable of becoming saturated. I would sit with moments and dissect them, then put them back together on paper. A grain of sand became an endless possibility for classification. If grains of sand were at all worth studying, then I would write the field guide on every different variety. I was the girl who walked around with a thesaurus. It was a light brown hardcover book with yellow writing on the cover. “Roget’s”. The words were embossed. I still have it to this day. It is sitting on a shelf in my office, a gift I give myself anytime I need to seek meaning and deeper understanding. A love of words during my youth turned quickly into an obsession during college, then even more quickly into a compulsion after graduation. As Maupassant said, “I must get black on white.” That is not to say I was in need of intervention, but words consumed me. I spoke them out loud to myself, reciting the sentences that were forming me. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” T.S. Eliot understood the cadence of language and because he understood, I understood. Because Mary Oliver felt compelled and inspired by the white heron at Blackwater Pond, I went to the woods, in search of my own symbolism. Within the absence and voids Mark Strand so deftly and delicately coaxes from within words I found my own voice. And it was there where the penning of what I knew to be true in the world began. I write to keep the world in perspective. To knock it back from its skewed axis enough to try and understand it. I write to avoid the ever-feared cliché, to get inside the ring with a paragraph and work it over until it pleads for the bell. I write because I am hopelessly in love with the sound of words. All of my books have haphazardly scribbled in margins and dog-eared pages. A star here, an underlined passage there. I can't think of any other way to read a book than to constantly remind myself of why, if not to write. I write to discover foreign lands within myself. I wonder oftentimes about those who take no pleasure in it, why? Again, the author Andre Gide spoke to me, “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” In a world where what we see is what we get, it is important as writers to brighten that image; to make it accessible to as many people as possible. We can make blades of grass into tiny green swords that swipe at our shins. Skyscrapers become stilts for God. Tree branches are like twisted, arthritic hands. We hold the power of metamorphosis in our hands and all we have to do is get black on white. But we are not magicians. We can’t turn numbness into passion. We can’t use our pencils to erase wrong, and the sting of heartache still smolders even when cloaked in eloquent language. Sometimes I wonder if the seeds of my existence were watered with the ink of great authors and this is what pushes my pen to the paper at night and on sad days. Or maybe it is simply the need to write. What is true in the world? What is our purpose in the universe? How do I live my life? On countless pages, I deliberate. I spread the wrinkles of my mind flat in order to take more in and then I write. Sometimes I wonder at the eerie fleetingness of the written word. When a poet settles into his bed at night and picks up his journal to record the slips and falls of his day, it seems odd to me the urgency to get it all down. It’s sad really, the art of writing things down because when you think about it, we write things down to remember them later. Do I write because I want to remember my own life? Inevitably, the answer to that question, like many of the wonders of the world, is to write. It is a vicious cycle, like playing duck-duck-goose with myself. I must write in order to understand why I write. Stepping onto foreign shores is not always the easiest task. There are many obstacles to tackle on the road to self-discovery. Writers are pretentious, arrogant. We belong to workshops, we are serious. We are the most popular kids in school and also the ones who care less about football games and more about Chaucer or scientific notation. We like to talk about words. We hate each other, are viciously jealous, but can recognize a good thing when we read it, even if it is not our own. We steal from Joyce, Hemingway, Baldwin and Whitman with no intentions of returning what we take. We scan the dictionary for the perfect word, and then devour it like wolves. We are ruthless, proud, demure, and calculating, but at least we are all these things together. A writer’s biggest fear and ally is the world itself. I am sometimes afraid that I will not be able to adequately and justly recount the world around me. It is almost like a blind man seeing for the first time. There are so many aspects to sight: color, space, shade, size, movement, that to realize all these things at once would send any mind reeling. As a writer, I fear this disillusion, yet desperately seek to capture it. No matter how difficult, if a writer succeeds, then he or she has contained the world---lassoed its rearing, ugly head and corked it in, like a tiny ship in a bottle. From this triumph, we can poke and prod to learn more about ourselves and our lives within this world. We begin to understand from rolling the bottle between our hands how small the world is, and what connects us to its every aspect. Language transcends barriers of race and gender. We name everything, like Adam and Eve voraciously scouring the Garden of Eden, in hopes of lending meaning to what we see. Words act as grafts between cultures. And ultimately, poet or not, we begin to see worth in the art of writing. And I do think that only the observant eye of a writer could capture all the elements of sight at once. However, unlike a photographer, our negatives develop on paper. Instead of using shadow and light to know something is round, we use adjectives and similes. We can sway a reader by changing the round object into a ripe, fuzzy peach, or a different kind of round, the ethereal sphere of a bubble freshly blown. Some say the written world is not real. They claim it is an embellished representation of what one person thinks is real. I disagree. Allowing ourselves into other people’s perceptions is what makes our lives real. By stepping onto their shores, we are given permission to question, to run about barefoot and wonder like a child. We see for the first time all over again. The written world is one of the only mediums that lets us travel to these foreign lands consistently and without resistance. Writers offer a kind of displacement that one can only get lost in through words. A good book can take you anywhere you want to go. Where else are we permitted to wander and explore the capacities of our own minds and free ourselves of the world we know for a moment or two? Writing is the fount of our existence. For thousands of years, writers have existed from the primitive scrawlings of the cavemen to the circumspectly structured theories of the philosophers. That is not to say that in order to write, you must be one of the world’s greatest thinkers, this is plainly not the case as so clearly demonstrated by this meager book. I think some of the best writers do write for a higher purpose, they too, are in search of a safe harbor for their thoughts. But perhaps writing is for the bold. It is for people who seek to find and don’t stop until they have reached somewhere they have never been. It is for those few who have an irreconcilable need to express. And again, for those who simply wish to create something they are proud of. Ayn Rand said that she decided to be a writer, not in order to save the world, or to serve her fellow men, but for the simple, personal, selfish, and egotistical happiness of creating the kind of men and events she could like, respect and admire. There is a certain poignancy in wanting to assemble something as honest as that. I sometimes laugh when I call myself a writer. Images of me in twenty years in a dimly lit room with bad wallpaper, hunched over a typewriter, a cigarette dangling from my lips and a short glass of warm liquor on the desk next to me abound through my head. I see my face, and I am shocked at the immutable frown I wear. Then, I look more closely and see the corners of my mouth quiver and upturn ever so slightly and I know this is the beginnings of a smile. I am revealed, I have found another sandy shore. ~~~~ Half of my work was not written in a dimly lit room at all. In fact, the majority of it was written in the brightly colored cafes of Bali, Indonesia, humid and rich with the woodsy smell of incense and earthy coffee. It was there I struggled with how to package these stories, these foreign shores, and seemingly random musings I have stockpiled over the years and then it came to me. Snapshots. Forget the chronology. Cut the narrative loose. I have kept my story imprisoned by the structure of how I would tell it and married myself to the thought that it had to have a clear beginning and an end. That it had to move from a dark to a lighter place. But all snapshots have shadows and all of them have light. In fact, we can’t have photographs without both. It’s no coincidence that photographs develop in a dark room, but can only be seen in the light. So I’ve decided to write about all themes, light and dark. But also about the in between. About nature. And traffic. And drugs, and live music, and the taste of bone marrow. Click. About being a twin. About words. About dragonflies. Relationships. Click. About loneliness and about hope. Click. About love. About love. About love. Click. Sleepless nights. Patriotism. Death. The interconnectedness of all living things. About Chicago. About Bali. About the mountains. Click. Click. Click. For as long as I can remember I’ve been collecting moments in the form of words, like snapshots. The buzz of window with a passing train. A trail of dirt behind the train of a lace dress. The lazy and seductive gait in which he walks. They come and I gather them like wildflowers, gently wrapping them in a shroud of burlap words, tying them lovingly with string and then gifting them off to the market of the world. This has always been the case. As I child I would tear out pages of words from books and tape them into a makeshift photo album I used as a scrapbook. Shel Silverstein. Norton Juster. Dr. Seuss. I created a paper temple and constructed an altar of words to better know the world. If life was a language I could not understand, then words were surely my interpreter. And ultimately, as an adult, words help me know myself. That being said, this is not an instructional manual for how to interpret poetry. It’s not a plea with you to be a better reader or even to read more. I am not a teacher. I am just an observer. Of life. Of human nature. I am a student of the universe and this is my five paragraph essay. The lessons I learn are taught by the gaseous twinkling of the night sky, they are found in the soft, delicate lines of my grandma’s hands. There are lessons everywhere. In dreams. In the throaty song of the mountain sparrow at five o’clock in the morning. In heartbreak. I am writing this blog with the goal of inspiring you to see life through the poetic lens within which I view every day moments. I challenge you to find passion in the plaintive. Ah-ha in the hum drum. As you leaf through the paper temple of my life and take a front seat at the altar of my words I ask you not to look for anything, but notice what you feel. Step into my snapshots. Wander a while. Wave a careful hand through the shadows and feel the light, warm and abundant on your face. Feel my joy. Sympathize with my pain. Find meaning in the composition. Then notice that the composition doesn’t follow a specific story line. Be an observer of all the moments. Mundane and profound. Rambling and succinct. These snapshots are the fingerprint of my journey and through the capturing and sharing of them I have discovered that fingerprint to be a part of the giant collective hand of the universe. So sit, my friend. Fold open my collection of moments, my snapshots of truth. And know that even in this moment, this delicious, torturous moment right before I imagine you sitting cross-legged on the floor, eager and brimming with curiosity, to open up the first page of my soul, I have already cataloged it. Click.
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