On Writing, I

There is a scene in the second “movement” (entitled “Revisions to a Manifesto”) of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch where Frances McDormand’s character lies smoking in bed next to Timothée Chalamet’s character whilst working on an article, travel typewriter perched on her lap, pecking away carefully. I am not embarrassed to admit that I think about this scene every time I break out the Royal Quiet DeLuxe that I am typing on currently and know that it is only a matter of time before I perch it on my lap in bed whilst next to a woman I just slept with; nor am I embarrassed to admit that part of the desire to do so is to make myself seem more hot and fuckable to other tgirl writers. Any appeal to the tgirls whose hobbies are drugs and having girlfriends is merely an accessory.

Some of these aforementioned tgirl writers (and non-tgirl writers) that I admire the most have a way of writing that is autodidactic and reflective of what they are feeling and where they are in their life, presented in a straightforward, unblemished way. I often find this to require a lot of intention on my part and not come as fluid to me as I would like. As a poet you would think that I find the idea of merely writing in a way that is autodidactic and reflective of what I am feeling and where I am in my life in a straightforward, unblemished way to be quite easy; but to say that just writing about your feelings is easy is like saying that just composing music about a smell is easy—they are two wildly different things, feeling and writing. What does writing about your feelings even mean, anyway, other than sitting down at the typewriter and bleeding? I would also like to propose that poetry is merely writing in a way that is autodidactic and reflective of what I am feeling and where I am in life in a straightforward and unblemished way; it’s just that verse and metaphor are the most straightforward and unblemished way to express the unexpressible.

This is not to say that I think somehow my experiences are uniquely fucked up in any particular way, a way that is fundamentally holy and inconceivable, one that can only be expressed in sacred forms, and even then with only a fraction of the true meaning shining through; I do not have near enough delusions of grandeur to even remotely consider this possible, nor am I currently nor have I ever been suicidal enough to think that I am somehow uniquely fucked up in a way that no one can understand. Nor do i think that my experiences and my life are somehow mundane and not worth examining, that I have no story to tell or words or lessons to share; there is only one of me and there only ever will be one of me, with my own unique combination of bullshit and charm that no one else can come close to. Rather, as I said before, poetry is just the best way of expressing it all; it is the medium with the best fit, the form that gets closest to teh truth, even if the world of universals and feelings is metaphysically very, very different from the written word and the private languages we as writers naïvely attempt to form in our bodies of work.

Sometimes I merely have nothing to say on the topic of my life that can be expressed as poetry; divorce is just another synonym for betrayal. Shall I write “betrayal” on every centimetre of the page, just to cover it in my raw truth? Some private things are not meant for public consumption, no matter your stance on vulnerability.

But then again: everything is meant for blood on the page in some way or another, no matter your stance on its suitability for public consumption; and thus it becomes fit for it. The wound is enough.