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The poem in question: Accepting Denial

This is the last in the series of poems coming from assignments in my freshman English class. Unlike Aftermath and Achievment, I remember the details of the assignment leading to Accepting Denial.

Each member of the class was given five note cards with a word on them, and we were to take those words and incorporate them into our poem. I distinctly remember wanting something “paradoxical,” and I imagine this was because I was still taken with Thomas Covenant and all the discussion of the “paradox of white gold” found within. I remember mentioning the desire for paradox to Mr. Williams, and I also remember a note scribbled from him on my final copy: “I like the paradoxical title!” I suspect he was just humoring me, but I guess we’ll never know for sure.

I am going to dig around some more for the original copy of this poem, because I think some of the wording changed a few years later as I went through a revisionism period. I also want to see if I can find out what my five words were, because I can’t remember, and that bothers me. My best guess is that they included some form of “tattered,” “loathed,” and “denial.”

Now, thus far in my commentaries, I haven’t really touched on what the poems were about. This one, fairly obviously I would imagine, is about being a teenager (or not, but I was teen-age when I wrote this, though it isn’t autobiographical), feeling like you don’t belong, and trying to cover up who you really are to fit in. Of course, often when people do that, others can see right through them, and the acceptance-seekers end up feeling even more unbelonging. In this way, it is also hilarious that the poem was written on Valentine’s Day.

So, they feel like they have “little to lose,” by pretending, but in reality have even “less to gain.” One unforunate part of this poem, though, is that they are “Loathed by many, / Rejected outright by all, save one.” It makes more sense to me now for it to read the other way around: “Rejected outright by many, / Loathed by all, save one.” It seems more fitting that everyone would loathe these people (though “loathe” seems too strong a word), but that there would be some who exercised enough compassion, or at least restraint, not to reject them outright.

I like to think that the one who accepted these tattered youths is God, who I believe loves us as we are, no matter where we may be in our lives, and no matter who in the world doesn’t love us. Unfortunately, the poem feels unfinished from that perspective, as I also believe that God would have some sage advice for these kids, and the fact that is left unoffered strikes me as un-Godlike. Still, I could not then and cannot now pretend that I have all the answers, and will leave it at that.

As a postscript, I am still taken with Thomas Covenant. The Chronicles and Second Chronicles are among my favorite books that I have ever read. I greatly anticipate the concluding books of the Last Chronicles, something I anticipate (ha!) doing for the next several years until they are published.

The poem in question: Achievement

This poem was for another assignment for Mr. Williams’ class, and, being as lazy as I previously mentioned I am, I used the same theme, just from a slightly different perspective: that of the victor of the Great Battle. In fact, Achievement could probably just be tacked on to the end of Aftermath and we could call it a day. This is double dipping at its finest, folks.

The only thing I wonder is if “All is dark, save a lone flame / Held by the victor / Of the Great Battle,” how exactly is he “crowned / In his triumph / And mirth”? Are bats doing it? Perhaps Daredevil got a sonic resonance from the weeping woman’s sobs? The simplest explanation is that he is only metaphorically being crowned, what with him being the last one standing, as it were. I imagine him taking the weeping woman as his new queen to rule over with him. He hopes she has some mining skills to fetch the gold for their real crowns.

I wonder what kind of grade I got on this poem? I hope it wasn’t very good. I dug through a few boxes last night to try and find the original copy, but I haven’t found it yet.

A funny thing to note: many of my poems begin each line with a capital letter. A lot of the poetry I have seen follows this practice, and I am unsure why. Perhaps Wikipedia knows the answer, but I don’t care enough to go look right now. I continued this practice for quite a while until I realized that was downright silly (though, to be fair, possibly no more silly than another trend I took up: all lowercase letters except for words like “I”). As I do these commentaries, it will be interesting to note the different styles I used throughout the years.

The poem in question: Aftermath

Written September 20, 1993, I believe Aftermath is the first poem I wrote that I kept. I’m not 100% sure; I’d have to go back and check through my high school English papers (yes, I’m such a big nerd that I have my classwork from my freshman year of high school).

I had Mr. Williams for freshman English. That year was the only year that I took “Honors English.” English was near the top of the list of my favorite school subjects, and was even my university major until I stopped going to school. When I go back to finish my bachelor’s degree someday, I’m pretty sure it will be in English or a related department.

Anyway, since English was one of my favorite subjects, why not take the honors or AP class every year? Because I’m lazy, that’s why. Since I excelled in the easy version of the class, I finished my work before everyone else and could often convince my teachers to let me do something else for the hour, like go to the computer lab to play Warcraft II. Those were the days.

Back to the poem. It was for a class assignment. I had recently read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant for the first time and was in to the fantasy setting. I liked the sound of the word “aftermath” and so set out to describe one. I picture battlegrounds, and this one particularly, more closely resembling something out of The Lord of the Rings rather than more modern day warfare. “A dreary and battered fortress” meant, to me, Revelstone or Helm’s Deep rather than a series of bunkers in the Middle East. This probably has to do with the fact that I think swords are about eight billion times cooler than guns.

I also fancied myself as somewhat of a morbid person–I thought it was cool, I guess–though upon reflection I realize that I was probably just weird. The morbid-thinking brought about cool words like “carnage” and “scattered limbs.”

The young woman weeping was put in to evoke some emotion, specifically the emotion that causes teachers to give As on class assignments. This is obviously not one of my best works, but I was 13 and just wrote this because I was supposed to. It, along with other poem assignments from Mr. Williams’s class, served as a testing ground for two years later, when I wound up in Miss Decker’s junior English class and really started writing a lot more, often because Miss Decker hated what I wrote, which is a story for another time.

For a period of about three years at the end of my teenage experience, I really enjoyed writing poetry. Sometime after that, the frequency of my writing diminished greatly, to the point where it has now been almost two years since I even tried to write a poem (not counting haiku, of which mine are mostly silly).

Lately I have been really wanting to get back into the whole poetry thing, but I haven’t found my avenue yet, or even my dusty side street.

I love words. They fascinate me to no end. When they are used in an interesting way, I feel that all is right with the world. Clever wordery is a balm to my balm-needing thing. Soul. Consider the lines from the new Barenaked Ladies single, “Easy”:

Call it self-defense / You can obfuscate and manipulate, but it’s only at your own expense

How often do you hear the word “obfuscate” used in regular conversation? I think that may be my point, but I’m not entirely sure, as it is past my bedtime and my daughter will be waking me up in about five and a half hours.

Anyway, the point is that I think that reviewing my old poetry and recapturing the things I was feeling at the time I wrote it will help me start writing more often again. So I am going to offer commentary for each of the 54 poems currently published on my site, plus a few others that I have tucked away in some notebooks somewhere. In a hundred years when college students are studying me and how great I was, it will be nice for them to know the real story behind “Aye Chi Monkey,” don’t you think?

I plan on going in order by date written, but I may deviate from that a little bit, depending on how things go. Without further ado, please proceed to the next blog entry. This one is long enough as it is.