Story Scientist

“In the beginning was the word,” is how ‘The Poet’ starts. As per my biased understanding, it’s a character’s insides spilled out in verse, or many verses. As per my objective understanding, that is all that poetry should be, from start to finish.

Elizabeth Acevedo’s contemporary-poetry-Novel, The Poet, is a collection of poems written in the perspective of Xiomara: a fierce, aloof teenage girl in a fastiduously christian community within her Harlem neighborhood. Xiomara’s poems have been awarded The National Book Award of 2018, along with four other accolades and several others shortlisted. Elizabeth Acevedo was probably a teenager like me when some of these verses were first conceived. But that’s not even the worst part for me. The worst part is…

Xiomara is nothing like me. Not one bit is she the kind of poet I have always aspired to be, and her verses are nothing like the ones I first envisioned when I started out on this quest. Just look at one of her verses, which actually happens to be one of my favorite ones:

Unhide-able

Now that’s a journal entry embedded in meter. A lot of the “rules” and adherances are gone in this. Tis’ not a sophisticated feeling infused into these poems, these are the latent demons in every teenage girl, catholic or not. How feminine and demure can a girl be until she is forced to recognize the masculinity that everyone sees in her? How long till people find it so hard to envision you in a dress and makeup, looking pretty, that you end up finding it hard to believe it’s possible yourself? How long till you stop talking to your mami about your girlhood, or boyhood, or both? Cheers to feeling ugly, and turning ugliness into poetry.

In the spirit of forging verses out of inner feminine manifestations, here are the verses which come seem to come from somewhere so deep within me that I hope no one knows the real person holding the pen.

At the end of the day,

it’s not about the dress you wear,

but whether you are pretty enough,

to belong in a poem.

To take up space while being thin,

in a boy’s pumpkin-mind.

And attract jokes into flirtatious signs.

At the end of the day,

“Being pretty is not being beautiful.”

I admitted with a sigh.

Heres’s something else I dug up from a little while back:

He doesn’t fill up the world around me

the room stays empty

barren and plant-less

what blossoms is the folliage in me,

every lotus I had planted,

every pink flower’s rose-coloured petal

you deepen it to blood red

and make me shallow as the

bottom of the reality check

I swim in, tip-toed.

One needs precision to write poems, which is what I want to build in myself. But I believe there are four stages to one’s journey as a poet, at least according to my experience. Stage one, when you first experience poetry, encounter it for the first time and try your hand at it without taking it too seriously. Stage two, when you discover you enjoy it truly, and start holding yourself to gargantuan standards of perfection, trying to get every detail right. Stage three, when you truly start becoming a poet. This third stage is when you start getting out of your head entirely, when all those pinterest quotes about “expressing your inner feelings” become material and real for you. This is when you truly start to need poetry, when you start reaching for your notebook when there are tears in your eyes and when you start to spill your guts onto the page. This is also when your poetry usually shows up in extremes: either messy to the max or genius with a little bit of needed shaping. I’m currently going through this stage, and I believe it will be years before I graduate to the last stage, which is: mastery. I believe that word speaks for itself, for it has the excitement of the first stage, the seriousness of the second stage, and the raw passion of the third stage, all glossed with incredible mastery and experience. Those poems must feel like carving michelangelo, but effortless and exhausting at the same time. I really don’t know yet.

In the spirit of poem-passion, I’ll end this with a poem I wrote at night, in my bed, seething with rage that needed somewhere to go.

Pages and pages,

the prettiest ink,

and the smell of new beginnings on the cover.

And all I could write,

over and over on those exquisite lines,

was in large letters:

I HATE MYSELF

Until it feels like,

it is tattooed, making my skin crawl.

Scribbled all over my body,

and scrawled on all the walls.