Month: February 2018

Today I wanted to do something a little different. Every week I write a poem and tell you the hows and whys and the message, but I have never really delved into my inspirations and history within spoken word. Its not a particularly crazy story, but it does give me the chance to share some of my favorite poets with you all and any excuse to do that is good by me.

My first significant experience with poetry was in eighth grade. We listened to “To This Day” by Shane Koyczan (Remember him we’ll come back to him in a bit). This was my first time hearing spoken word and it led to me getting really into my first poetry assignment in school, an “I am” poem based on my identity. That same year (I think it gets a bit fuzzy) I heard a friend of mine perform “Scratch & Dent Dreams.” It was here that I realized how attainable poetry really is. After eight grade I lost track of poetry. I would hear the occasional poem from people like Suli Breaks who have a tendency to go viral on Facebook. In the tenth grade my English class participated in a school version of Poetry Out Loud. The poem was titled “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur. It was during this project that I fell in love with poetry. It became a running joke. Here I was, the science and math nerd, reciting poetry. Sometimes I found people like Harry Baker and his melding of math and poetry, but I also fell into the deep pit of poetry online. Groups like Button Poetry and Write About Now filled the gaps, but it was specific poets that captured my ears and caused me to stare into a mirror and start speaking. It was Levi The Poet, listener, Neil Hilborn, and Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye that inspired me. Listener’s poems “Wooden Heart” and “You Were A House On Fire” inspired me to give music to my words. Levi The Poet’s series Correspondence Fiction inspired me to tell a story that is part fiction and part reality. Neil Hilborn’s “OCD” and “Punk Rock John” inspired me to put every ounce of energy into each poem. And Shane Koyczan (told you to remember the name), his poem “my darling sara” taught me to pour my heart out.

Every poem I hear taught me something new. When I find a new poet or spoken word band like Hotel Books, TAL, Sleeping Giant, and To Speak Of Wolves, I am changed. My poetry like my life is a quilt of experiences. It is the sum of influences and experiences. It is the poets who inspire me that make me stand and speak. They are the wind in my sail and they may never know it. But that’s okay. They live their life creating incredible beauty, incredible sadness, incredible joy. They give birth to new stories and to memories. They give me a release. And they inspire me to do the same.

So throughout this blog I have always talked about both the style and the meanings behind my poetry. I am starting to reach a point where I no longer feel the need to discuss my technique because I utilize the same general techniques in many of my poems. So for now on I will only be discussing technique if I utilize something new.

 

That being said, let’s get into “The Mask”. This poem is a big coming out for me. Before this I released poems that talked about being unhappy and such, but this poem describes the life I have been living for longer than I know. I can’t remember when I put on my mask. For as long as I can remember, I would hide my terror at making a mistake with a veil of confidence and sarcasm. I would sprinkle in some self deprecating jokes and a morbid sense of humor to mask the moments that reality leaked through. I was good at this. I recently confessed to my mom that I hated myself in high school. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. For years I hid that from my family and friends. I can’t speak for her, but I think it caught her by surprise. To give some background, my mom is a guidance counselor who works with a lot of kids who struggle with things like depression, so for her to not know when her own son was struggling was tough. I regret not talking to her. I regret not telling anyone. But I hid for so long that I sort of forgot that I was hiding at times. My main source of fear (I don’t call it depression or anxiety because that would warrant a diagnosis and I am no doctor) is perfectionism. To me, building a mask was always a better option than admitting that I was unhappy. To be sad or angry was imperfect in my mind. I prefered to work on my cocky, sarcastic, morbid, borderline egotistical character than reveal the mess of a person underneath. Every little mistake, I internalized rather than express how it hurt.

The poem tells the result. If you listened to last week’s poem you know that I recently went through a pretty rough patch. After being able to so casually keep on the mask, this struggle made me break character. “For the first time in forever I shall see my own face in the mirror.” I was caught off guard by how far gone I really was. I have been trying to get ahold of who I was before, but so far separating the mask from reality has been extremely hard and I fear the old me is forever changed. It is sort of like those pictures of a tree growing around a sign. I have fused to my mask and now am in the painful process of tearing myself away from it. I keep catching myself trying to shell up again. I’ll build a part of a mask and catch myself. I am trying to figure out how to live without this crutch.

I also want to make something clear. If you are hiding, if you built your own mask, take it off. Tell someone and get help. If you can’t take it off, ask for help. If you can’t tell someone in person just yell into your keyboard. I couldn’t talk about this in person. I have conditioned myself to lie about feelings, but something about just typing things out makes it easier. So, set yourself free. Whatever it takes, be real, be you and I’ll do my best to be me.

“Brother, I Hunt for My Angel” is not only the longest poem I have ever recorded, but also the most involved on the production side. The poem was recorded in segments. Each verse and chorus was its own unique recording that then had to be spliced together. This process led to some interesting changes made throughout. The first major difference was the ability to edit the actual content of the poem post recording. I ended up scrapping one instrumental segment for this initial version of the poem. Speaking of instrumental sections, that was the reason I recorded the poem in segments. I was concerned how the instrumental would sound after recording and I did not want to risk losing the whole poem to it. This was my first time experimenting with instruments in my poetry, so I kept things relatively safe and only included my mandolin, which I recorded in the same process as my normal poetry. I think the extra effort was worth it, although I would have liked to kept working on the sound quality of the instrumental segments so the mandolin rang a little cleaner.

The technical act of writing the poem was very similar to previous poems despite the added challenge of deciding how to incorporate the mandolin. I utilized a lot of repeating phrases and structures. This is particularly evident in the word “brother” and in all the music segments. I wanted to create an almost echoing correspondence within the lyrics of the poem. I did break the structure in a few places where I thought the main character would break (We’ll get into how I knew where he would break). Overall, the technical writing in this poem was secondary to the message.

This blog and my poetry is my outlet. I tend to hold things in until I burst, but this past Sunday was the single worst day of my life. Just under the past two years I have been in a relationship that I can only describe as life saving. My girlfriend was my best friend and we had our whole future planned out. I was never one to believe in love at first sight, but the work we both put in, the understanding we had, I thought our love was unbreakable. And it was, but not irreplaceable. Sunday night, I got on a Skype call with my girlfriend, and with tears in her eyes, she said we should break up. I was shocked. I loved her. I still do. And she loved me. She even said so as we talked. But that’s where it gets complicated. It was because she loved me that she wanted to end things now before she hurt herself and me more than we already were. She had found another person. Her “prince” in the poem. I couldn’t blame her. He was at the same college, I am three hours away. He is another artist. I am a scientist. How could I compete. I couldn’t just let her go though. I had to make sure she was in good hands. So I talked to him. I made him promise me that he would take care of her. She was after all my angel. I still hurt, but I trust her to have made the right decision. And I trust she knows that she still has a part of me with her. I will stay. I am the brother on the road. She is my angel. He is the prince. And I will never forget her. I will never stop loving who she is and what she has done for me. But you’ll hear more about that in another poem.

 

“I Like to Say I’m Happy.” The title tells you everything you need to know about this short poem. It is an expression of all the unexplainable sadness that crops up. It is about the self doubt, the anxiety, the little dark thoughts that worm their way through everything. This blog post will be a little different then most of my post in that it is only in part about the poem. Although I wrote this with a structure in mind, it probably took the least amount of time of any poem I have written. “I like to Say I’m Happy” was completed in around ten minutes, while I waited for my chemistry class to begin. Normally I rewrite and edit every poem, but this is not just a poem for me. It is a kind of confession. It is an admittance of my own shortcomings. As a poet ( particularly a spoken word poet), it is expected that I would share my personal feelings and insights, but if you read the earlier post to this blog you will see that I hid behind fictitious stories and a prayer I grew up with. This poem is my first step out into the light. It is me saying that sometimes things are not perfect.

Before I dig to deeply into the personal side I wanted to cover the symmetric layout of the poem.

I like to say I’m happy

I live a good life

I smile when people say hello

 

I like to say I’m happy

Because I’m afraid of what they’ll say if I don’t

 

I like to say I’m happy even though I don’t know if I am

 

I like to say I’m happy

because I’m not sure why I’m not

 

I like to say I’m happy

I live trying to forget

I try to ignore the voices that say I’m not

The poem follows a three line, two line, one line, two line, three line layout that is reflected over the central statement. That along with the repeated title phrase is supposed to build an almost circular poem. It begins and ends with the voices of other people, although the ending voices are internal as compared to external in the start. This change in external to internal is another point of symmetry with the top half being focused on the external force of other people, while the bottom revolves around the inner struggles that seek to tear us down.

Now that I have explained my structure, it’s time to do the hard part. Anybody who has known me for awhile knows that I do not particularly like expressing emotions. I try to hide any feelings behind morbid jokes and my focus on academics. Unfortunately you can only bottle things up so much, especially when you are dealing with a host of self inflicted stress. People often use being a perfectionist as a way to brag, while also seeking pity for having a weakness, but real perfectionism is so much more than a cliche answer to an interview question. Perfectionism is seeing every wrong answer on a test as a fatal flaw in who you are as a person. It is not accepting anything less than a hundred percent, because you thought everyone would make fun of you otherwise. That was me. Most of my schooling was completed under this fear that I wouldn’t be good enough. I lived in a world where you were either the best or you pretended to not care about that topic. Even after I became an Eagle Scout, National Honor Society President, and was in line to become Valedictorian, I still wasn’t good enough. I hated that I couldn’t meet my own standards which meant I hated myself. Imagine being too afraid to admit something was wrong with you because that would mean you weren’t perfect, that was the twisted world I lived in, and still live in at times. I still struggle at times, but through high school and now in college I have learned some strategies to fight back the doubt. I met people who showed me ways to balance things. I connected with my best friend who taught me that it is okay to talk about it. My poetry is my release. My poetry is me admitting I am not perfect and that is okay.