turmeric, the golden spice, auspices; or, the poet as master of his own identity

I love to talk.  I'm delighted by the mere combination of words, sounds, and pauses into subtler (and less subtle) meanings.  I'm fascinated by the processes involved with communication generally; naturally, those extend to a (strictly amateur) love of linguistics, etymology, translation, languages.  It's no surprise, then, that I also greatly enjoy writing, writing anything, from poetry to prose, fiction to non-fiction, text messages and e-mails.  The act of expressing myself verbally is something I always manage to take joy in, and I'm grateful that I am this way!  Talking, reading, and writing are some of the cheapest hobbies you could possibly have, so I'm very lucky that they're also my favorites.

With that in mind, it consistently surprises me how truly terrible I am at keeping up a regular internet writing outlet, like a blog or twitter account.  I enjoy writing for the internet just as much as I enjoy writing everywhere else!  Part of the problem, I suspect, is the untargeted nature, the potential breadth of my audience; unlike an e-mail, I can't tailor what I write to just one individual.  And I can't write for myself, as I might write poetry or a story -- if I were to do that in a blog format, I might as well be writing a diary.

Still, I was inspired by reading through a friend's blog today, so I'm going to make an effort to return to the blog-eat-blog world.  I'm not sure what I might post on here specifically.  It could be random thoughts about the day, description of tasty food I've eaten, my feelings on a movie I saw, some poetry I wrote -- you know, a blog!  But you might be seeing a lot of poetry, as I've been taking a poetry class and I'm starting to appreciate just how working at something can bring about improvement.

It's odd to say it, but I don't have much experience working to improve a specific skill.  I am lucky that there are many things I'm naturally pretty good at or can pick up extremely quickly; as for many other skills that I've accrued, I've developed them oftentimes without even realizing it, just by repeating some activity until its yarikata was hammered into my skull.  And while I'm no master of any of these (which are mostly practical or technical skills), I'm good enough -- with minimal effort -- to be satisfied.

But there are many worlds upon worlds of skills that I have little natural talent in, but covet immensely.  Most of these are musical or artistic in nature -- things that require practice and dedication rather than pure study and learning, or mere repetition.  I truly struggle to muster up that focus to work at something consistently over an extended period of time; when something doesn't just click for me right away, it's easy to get discouraged.

Sorry if I'm being vague -- it's just that I've gone through the same process of

initial spark of interest -> frenzied gathering of practice materials -> week or two of distracted attempts at producing something halfway worthy -> spark of interest in something else

that it seems strange to single out any one endeavor.  And that cycle on its own wouldn't be that hard to overcome if it weren't for the lingering feeling that I'm supposed to be able to get it more easily, that I'm special and I don't need to practice like most everyone else does.

Which is why the reasonable part of me is so gratified at seeing how my poetry has improved after working at it for 12 weeks.  When I started this poetry class, I looked through the word document I keep storing the 30-or-so poems I've written in my life that I thought might be worth putting in a full book of poetry someday.  When I reread those poems those few months ago, I thought they were fantastic.  For some of them, I was frankly amazed that I had even been able to write so well.

I went back through those poems again last week, and I was completely unimpressed.  The poems themselves didn't get any better or worse, of course; it was my standards for poetry that changed, and those much for the better.  And in such a short time!  It just so happened that time had included the only formal education I had ever received in how to write poetry, and what a difference it made.

The title of this blog comes from a poem I wrote recently.  I won't share the whole poem yet (it's surely not done), but this is the line:

I knew the ache, I’d been a tree in wind,
Twisted cruelly with indecision

We all understand the pain and the sense of bending (perhaps breaking) that accompanies a tree in wind.  But before that poem, I wrote another that focused on the word "twist."  The first stanza:

Turn it over in your hands,
Twist to breaking, understand
That what you hold is something new,
Something shapeless and unplanned;
Made that way by your own hand.

In that poem, I used the concept of twisting as a metaphor for destruction/creation.  As trees twist in wind, so we twist in the gales that life sends at us.  The difference between us and the trees is that we have the choice of how to twist; we can control, somewhat, whether to twist in a way that will bend or break us.  And, much more importantly, we have a say in how we will grow once we've been twisted into that strange new shape.

We all of us, we trees and people, must grow.  I'm finding that, as my power to twist words into shapes develops, so too does my sense of control over my own life, and my relationship to the experiences that make up who I am.  What could be sweeter than that?