“If you want to be a writer, you must come to love words and sentences the way a foodie loves food, a fashionista loves clothes, a cineaste loves film, a fat boy loves doughnuts: obsessively.” – A Professor of Mine
Recently, I have made the transition from being a dancer to a writer, and now recently a poet. At first, it was somewhat challenging to make this change because dance was the way that I lived my life for so long. It became a part of my identity. The way in which I saw the world and created art was from a deeply physical standpoint—I carved out space in the moment. I was the art form creating itself simultaneously with the reality. This is very different then writing to say that you must meditate and internalize the world around you before you express your thoughts on the page.
This summer, I had a lot of time to reflect. I spent most of my summer in isolation, (no, I am not Emily Dickinson). Any writer knows that spending time alone is essential in shaping their work. Through this decision, I had time to explore many poets, while attempting to create my own voice in my poetry. I quickly realized that this was incredibly difficult and found myself trying to emulate the same voice of many poets before my time. Much of the time I was in agony seeing that my work wasn’t coming out the way I had expected. I then stepped away from my work and thought deeply about some of my life experiences. It then occurred to me that this: reflections of one’s own life—is the most important quality of a poet. My work then was able to manifest its own beauty and voice through my own various stylistic approaches, while also remembering the foundation that many poets in the past had created. Acknowledging your past, is a quality that T.S. Eliot emphasizes a great deal in his Tradition and the Individual Talent.
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”
I have been deeply shaped by many poets including: Louise Gluck, Georg Trakl, W.S. Merwin, and Jeffrey McDaniel. All of which who have taught me different qualities about the image, memory and structure. Jeffrey McDaniel in particular, has been a poet I have discovered recently who reaches for images in his work that are incredibly wild and absurd, who launches you into another world, while also keeping in mind the consistent lyrical quality of the poem. This is a quality that I like to focus on my work as well, letting my work be guided by a number of images while also never allowing myself to stray away from the inner musicality and structure of the poem.
Right now, my latest project has been working on my Senior Portfolio entitled, The Moon Is Painted with Fire. It aims to capture the mirroring quality between art and life.
All in all, I am excited to continue this journey as a poet, and complete my last and final semester as a senior!