"Poesis", Confession, Fear of Publishing, and the Imagination Screen

Confession as construction, and an etymological justification of emotionality in poetry.

Last night, I watched the film rendition of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I’d finished the book a couple weeks ago. It was good, really good, but they messed with the characters a bit. For example, Mick Kelly was played by a twenty-five year-old woman who was pretending to be nineteen so she could play a ten year-old. It didn’t work. And they forewent diving deep into two of the main characters. I felt the same flumph of disappointment when I watched East of Eden, only a million times worse. The book is biblical in scope and depth, and the film is two hours of James Dean pouting at the camera. But I graduated to a kind of forgiveness while watching The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; I guess I — unfamiliar with films and wouldn’t even know where to start in terms of direction — had previously thought that a film rendition of a book should play it out basically word by word.

And obviously that’s not feasible, temporally or financially economical, nor would it necessarily be effective in a visual representation of the morals of a text. I suppose it’s the director’s job (screenwriter’s job?) to take a scene or scenes of text, distill them down to the crux, the moral, the point, then play that out however they see fit. And then stack the scenes in a way that roughly follows the narrative trajectory of the story in the book. I mean, that sounds right to me. I don’t know.

But there’s nothing better than watching someone else’s imagination of something you’ve imagined, and have it line up perfectly. I remember that was my experience in watching the first Twilight movie when I was thirteen or fourteen. Like there was a wire plugged into my skull and it was attached to a big screen and that screen was broadcasting my exact imaginations. But that also used to be a big fear of mine when I was a kid; that there was this big screen invisible to me but visible to everyone else and they were watching all my thoughts play out in public. Like me stabbing Johannah when she bullied me or me kissing any and every boy I saw. Usually I imagined this screen as being on my forehead.

I’ve been a little frozen writing here, on Substack. I’ve been doing things for the novel I’m writing, you know, writing scenes that merge together. Writing moments that bridge those scenes together. And they are small scenes. The individualized experience of filling a water bottle. Looking at a grocery shelf of mustard and ketchup and selecting which one to buy. Those nameless moments and habits in which a whole life is buckled up.

I just saw a quotation by Michael Ondaatje that said something like that, about how writing a novel is about writing the small scenes. And that has been so much of my experience in writing, it’s been like that for my whole life. For example, in this new era where therapy is trendy — I, too, have hopped on the bandwagon, it’s a good one even if it does come with some language I find mawkish or cloying — people often talk about journaling. I see way more about it on Instagram, you know, in talk of morning routines and meditation. And there are journaling guides, or journals that you can buy that basically interview you about your current state. While I think it’s great — I think it’s important that more people put pen to paper even for the physical experience of your elbow etching out the way you feel, body-mind stuff — I have always been amazed that people don’t know how to “begin” a journal entry.

What do you mean you don’t know how to start? I imagine my confoundment is not unlike that of people who find out just how financially illiterate I am. I don’t know what equity is or what a bond or trust or stakeholder is. I can imagine what the last is. Someone who’s got a big financial stake in something. That’s about as far as I go. I know that interest is when they charge you for not having money. To me, I feel pretty resigned and defeated by it all, and it makes me not want to learn. I feel sort of hopeless around my financial situation, which, according to people like Marianne Williamson and other manifestation gurus, is the exact opposite way I should feel about money. I should feel that it’s all coming to me and everything. Well, I don’t. That’s just the truth. And the other truth is that I say I’m trying to change it, but there’s such a difference between trying to change something and saying you’re trying to change something. I think I am just saying it, because my behaviour hasn’t changed much. But maybe writing about that here is a good first step.

So. Journaling. I’ve never called it that. I’ve always just called it “writing in my diary”. “Journaling” seems too sterile and compulsory. I am very lucky that I developed this habit early. Unlike a saving habit that I wished I’d developed. Though my first ever purchase was a result of saving. I’d saved my allowance for weeks and weeks and weeks to buy this awesome Batman figurine from the now closed Toys Toys Toys on Avenue Road in Toronto. For weeks. I was so excited. Then, when the day came that I’d had enough money in my Batman piggybank, my parents took me to Toys Toys Toys. The Batman figurine was temporarily sold out. I remember my heart dropping. I had to wait? Nope, no thanks. I needed to spend that money and I needed to right then and there. So I reached for a dinky little Spiderman water gun that was on sale right beside the cash register. And my mom asked me if I was sure, and I said yes, and I bought it. It cost something like twenty-five dollars. All my money. And I went home and didn’t use it even one time. And then I couldn’t buy my Batman figurine when it did come back in stock. Anyway.

Journaling. I've always begun an entry the same way, and I always tell it to people who tell me they don’t know how to start one: what would I even say? What if I don’t know how I’m feeling or if I have no plans that day to write about?

You say how you’re sitting. You write about your immediate physical circumstances. Like how the light is falling or what kind of chair you’re sitting on. But I like to first write about exactly how I’m sitting. On the floor, against a wall, knees up, diary propped on my thighs. It’s sunny and 2pm. Stuff like that. From there is how everything else pours out. It’s amazing how there really always is an “everything else”, no matter if you think there won’t be. There really is.

Usually once I say how I’m sitting I’m already thinking about something else. And then I just write that down, too. Like how it’s cozy that it’s raining or that I have to pay my internet bill or call Dylan or get eggs.

I’ll transcribe some examples here that span some decades. I suppose it’s the one thing about me that hasn’t changed at all. It’s kind of nice, that there’s been that consistency in my life. I feel like that’s kind of the one thing that hasn’t changed even a little bit. Even my epithelial cells have replaced themselves completely something like four times. Meaning I’ve replaced my entire skin a bunch by now. Maybe the beginnings of the entries are how I can prove to myself that I’m still really the same kid. It’s nice.

September 7, 2004

Lying on the floor on my stomach with my left hand on the left page holding the book open with my knees bent up and feet in the air. Today was HARD!!!!

September 28, 2008

Sitting cross legged on my bed listening to new fav singer Taylor Swift listening to FEARLESS her new album. Just came home from track. Kind of sunny out still but getting dark.

January 8, 2015

Sitting at kitchen table while Ana makes pasta and Rachel studies in her room. Legs crossed. Ugh. Sad about Michael.

May 8, 2020

Sitting at desk with the sun coming in onto the page. Slumped over with chin in left hand. Can barely hold my head up. Gonna make a smoothie soon.

July 8, 2022.

Well, it’s over. Lying in bed, back hurting, crying. Fucking sunny outside and I fucking hate it. Why do my arms hurt too.

October 4, 2023

Sitting cross legged on my floor with my diary on the coffee table. Trying to make myself have good posture. To see if I can write while my shoulders are pushed back. Time for a new start. One month into new job at McGill.

I think that, when I was young, I had such a fear of that irrational scenario of the imagination screen — the one plugged into my skull that everyone could see but me — because, actually, I had such a desire for that to be the case. I think I really wanted to be understood. And I still do. I don’t understand why. But when I don’t feel like people understand me, or what I’m writing, I take it very personally. When I have an image in my head and my companion or interlocutor does not have that same image, I consider it a failing on my part.

And this brings me to my most nauseated feeling; the one about my collection of poetry coming out in two weeks. It’s the worst hypothetical possible. That my imagination screen is literally out there for everyone to see, and that people won’t “get” it. They won’t see the same things I did in my head and feel the same things in my heart as I did when I wrote the poems. And then I want to follow that up with, and what even is the point of writing a poem anyway. Who cares. Literally, who cares. But the point is the imagination screen. The feeling you get when you watch a movie that plays out exactly like the book did, and so you get to see your own heart and mind right there on the screen in front of you.

Man, it’s a bad feeling. I can’t get behind it. And I’d love to be a good sport and be grateful and say I’m excited. After all, aren’t I the one who submitted this manuscript? Aren’t I the one who submits my poetry to literary journals, aren’t I the one who promotes those publications on my own Instagram account? So what’s this issue I have with my first collection coming out?

It’s that fear of not being understood. That my imagination screen will land flat and dull and I won’t be understood, as I compulsively need to be. And the imagination screen is the thing I adore most about other people’s poetry, why I tend toward impressionist painting, and why I only really pick up literary realism and do my best at writing it.

I think being able to transmit the experience someone has in sidestepping a puddle on the way to work is more beautiful than writing about things that could never happen.

And this is a deeply personal opinion — I admire those who can write fantasy and world-build. I think that’s nuts. And it’s probably great for your neuroplasticity. It seems really hard, too. It’s just not for me.

Something I say and believe is that I am not a poet. In fact, the word poet makes me sort of want to shrivel up and die. It’s kind of excruciating to be even writing about it here, which is why I guess I should. When I do share that feeling, often to very close friends or my partner, that I don’t like my collection of poetry coming out because I don’t think of myself as a poet, I am more often than not met with the very reasonable sentiments of get over yourself or be proud of yourself or that’s a you problem, or the worst one, which is okay, like, I get it, but it’s awesome and I’m sure they’re so good!! So be proud of yourself!

I’ll explain why I feel this embarrassed, less-than sort of way. I think it’s because I don’t believe I write real poetry.

Poetry is, quite literally, a making. The word comes from the Greek ποιητής, poietes, which means “maker”. And it comes from the verb ποιέειν, poieein, “to make”.

And the concept of poesis-as-making takes from even further back, when you get into its Proto-Indo-European origins, from a verb that means “to pile, to gather”. And that, to me, is what poetry, like any other art-form, is: a making. And it’s a “making” in that it piles small things together, in the same way that piling sticks and clay and rocks makes a shelter or a home. You pile colour or scenes or fine lines or script lines or loops of yarn.

And there are an incredible many grammatical or syntactical ways that poetry is a piling or a gathering. The two that, to me, are the most literal pilings, are the literary devices of parataxis and hypotaxis. Bear with me here, as I get into the weeds. I am trying to work it out for myself.

Both of these words have the stem tax which is from the Greek τάξις, taxis, which means “arrangement” or “organization”. Like in “taxonomy”, the biological system of classification.

Onto this stem word taxis you have the prefix para- or the prefix hypo-. Para- is from the Greek preposition παρα, para, which means “next to” or “beside”. “Parataxis” is thus “the arrangement of things next to each other” or “the act of placing side-by-side”. This could mean that a paratactical phrase omits conjunctions such as “and” or “but” to add to an immediacy of feeling. An example could be: "Her eyes low, shoulders slumped, face downturned”.

Meanwhile, “hypotaxis” begins with hypo-, from ὑπο-, hupo, meaning “under” or “less than”. Like in “hypothermia”, to mean an extreme lessening of the body’s temperature. Thus “hypotaxis” is the “subordination of one clause to another”. A simple example could be something like, though politics is insane, my faith in humanity persists. With the “though” clause as subordinate to the main, standalone clause, “my faith in humanity persists”.

Hypotaxis is a way of creating a hierarchy of ideas; consider the reversal of the arrangement: Though my faith in humanity persists, politics is insane. While the ideas and information being conveyed are similar to each other, the sentiments end up being different. In the former, the “point” is that my faith in humanity persists. In the latter, the “point” is that politics is insane. This is the effect of hypotaxis.

Do you see how these are different kinds of pilings? Different ways to stack words to clarify an idea or an image? Do you see how these are ways of making? I believe that intention rather than incidence is what defines craftsmanship. That, if you are making, you should be piling things mindfully. Each word should be placed properly, like bricklaying.

And I don’t do this in my poetry. Well, that’s actually not entirely true. I do it in a couple of them. I think I have a hard time with my collection of poetry because I don’t consider myself a craftsperson in that way. And, to be frank, it is because I am impatient. Things come out of me just like that and I put them down. This has resulted in a rather confessional group of poems.

The confessional movement emerged in the States sometime in the 50s and 60s. If you look it up, the words used to describe confessional poetry are “autobiographical” or “highly emotive”. I also saw something that said that confessional poetry “reduced distance between the author and the reader”.

And those things are true about mine. And I think I look down upon confessional poetry, and thus am looking down on my own. Which is why I am nervous for my collection to come out.

I learned about poetry and literature in a very whitewashed, Westernized, and institutionalized way. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, I had the time of my life learning about the Romantics and the Renaissance and French stuff and the Greeks and Romans and John Milton and et cetera ad nauseam. We learned about sociological context of literatures, often historical moments engendered by shifts in the relationship between the state and various Christianities; we learned about the metrical feet of poems (like iambic pentameter) and versification.

I even went on to specialize. And, as these informal essays on etymology will show you, the things I learned during my time in formal education really profoundly added to my life. But, save for a theory seminar in which we talked about concepts of beauty and referred to it as “aesthetics”, I definitely didn’t learn about art. I didn’t learn about creative will. Here the concept of poiesis - the sense that an artwork is something pro-duced (or brought into being) - assumes a vital significance.

But in university, both in undergrad and grad school, the confessional poets were pointedly separate from the rest of poetry. There was always a sense that those who wrote in a confessional way that was in any way personal were somehow vomiting something out, performing an auto-exorcism, whether it was Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf or John Berryman or Robert Lowell. There was the sense that these people were performing an act of courage, and those who created more of a distance between themselves and the subject matter, often through intellectualizing, were creating acts of genius. And for genius you get to be revered, and for courage you get a pat on the back.

I’m a little self-conscious of how I sound right now. Do I sound bitter? I hope I don’t because that’s not how I feel. I think what I feel is that maybe I’ve actually been won over by confessional poetry. But I think that only happened through a merging of the part of me that is institutionalized, whitewashed and Westernized, and the other part of me that is just a girl or person. And that merging looks like me etymologizing yet again, as a justification for my own exorcisms:

As much as poesis was and is a “making”, the Greeks used the word to also mean “an unveiling”. That is, the heart of poiesis had less to do with the exercise of a will and more to do with the production of aletheia, the crucial Greek concept of truth. Of bringing something from concealment into the full light.

I then thought of the word confess, as in confessional. The word math is from the Latin prefix con from cum which means “with”), and fateor, which is derived from the Greek concept φᾰτός, phatos, which means “speakable" or, more interestingly, “speakable in a way that is revealing”.

But cum, when used in compound words and turned into con, changes its meaning from “with” to “An indication of completeness. A perfection of any act”.

Thus, a confession is a speaking-perfectly. An utterance that reveals the truth. A poesis in every rite. And I had never thought of it like that before. That the confessional poets were making something, were craftspeople in that they were unveiling an existing structure — like taking a tarp off a skyscraper and making it available for use — just as much as those makers who build new structures.

Maybe I’d thought I was being lazy in not versifying or refining as much as other writers. But I guess there isn’t laziness — there is a structure that is being revealed, and it is a structure that formed in all the massive and tiny mental experiences I have had. I’m glad I wrote this one out. I think I just made myself feel better about the collection. It comes out May 18.