I am so
angry.
Every time
you come around,
destruction
is in your wake.
Words create
life, yet you
just drain us away.
I
am so angry.
You just focus
on yourself,
not caring,
Unfeeling,
except for
your words.
Why
do your words carry
such weight,
but we are
nothing.
After reading some of the Black Mountain poets then sequentially having a hurtful experience, I wrote these lines. First and foremost, poetry is intimidating to me, as I have never really studied or read it. Yet through the readings of Robert Creeely, the lines just seemed to flow more naturally then when I have attempted to write poetry before. The structure and open versed aspect of his poetry really drew me in. Levertov says “…first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech” (1082). I will not explain the instance that brought me to write the poem, but I do hope you understand my emotions from it. I incorporate the idea from Osborne who while discussing Creely’s work states that “The stranglehold of syntax on liberation is broken, the reader being proper led from line to line by the need to conclude the sentence” (173). I hoped that it helped the reader understand the overflow of emotion and almost word vomit that one can have when they feel overcome with emotions. Using this helps create a rhythmic pattern that can also help smooth the emotions from anger to almost a plea or question at the end. Instead of asking this in a form of a question, I used a statement, as regardless of what the author asks, the question will not be answered because the person they are talking to, simply, does not care.
I imitated my lines after The Language by Robert Creely. He begins with two words, with a main phrase of “I love you” being repeated and wedged into two separate lines. My main phrase was “I am so angry.” By starting with “I am so” I hoped to create an emphasis on so. Just as one, in complaining when they are exhausted by an action, can drag out the word so to help create this. So means “to such a degree” meant to come before angry (Cambridge Dictionary). So is only used twice in the poem, both helping emphasize the degree of anger that is felt toward the subject. The reader should take a slight pause at the end of each line.
Starting the next stanza is “of sorts, is destruction.” I used this as the beginning to help encompass not only the path the unnamed subject has created but also in relation to “Words create/ life, yet you” which is meant to reflect how destructive words can be. “just drain us away” is the first line by itself as poem begins to shift from anger to exhaustion. This next stanza repeats the statement “I/ am so angry.” I am attempting to shift the light back on to the author, yet the last line reflects the contradiction the author has with the subject as they solely focus on themselves, ending this stanza with “You just focus.” The next two lines are grouped together and purposefully only two words per line- “on yourself/not caring.” This sums up the subject of the poem. Just as so is only used twice, the two lines are meant to represent the two years of exhaustion that has occurred. The last stanza is the longest, yet the reader should feel the most exhaustion coming away from it. Because it is long, pausing yet using one breathe per sentence is important. Returning back to this idea of words in relation to the subject, we end the poem with “Why/do your words carry/such weight,/but we are/nothing.” This is the longest, most breathy sentence and the reader should almost be exhausted by the end. The spacing between “but we are/ nothing” should indicate that nothing is how the subject feels about not just words, but others’ emotions and how they effect others lives. Using the spacing, I hoped that it would help create the distinction between the poem as a whole and the last word basing it off the ideas of “Of the comments on typography in ‘Projective Verse’. The one which had most influence concerned the use of textual spacing to notate silences in oral performance,” which is what I hoped to achieve with the last line (Osborne 175).
Overall, I attempted to use my style, spacing, and words to help recreate a Robert Creeley-esque poem, but focused more on emotions over an experience.
Works Cited:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/so#
Osborne, John. “Black Mountain and Projective Verse.” A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, Blackwell, 2001, pp. 175
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