coming to voice

It's been a long time, I shouldna left you...

"Hunger and Spit" is the name of a four-page poem that I recently finished. I still continue to make little edits, but it's essentially a poem that I was trying to write for months.

It was a relief to write it, to finish it. And also, it became my new favorite poem. LOL The way I judge my poetry is by constantly revisiting it. I have poems that I wrote in 1994, when I first started writing poetry. A lot of them are cringe-worthy. Seriously, it's "Oh, God, I didn't write that, did I?"

Standard teen angst fare.

But if I can revisit something over and over and over and still not cringe, I'm cool. I deem that a good poem. Some stuff can't live outside of the time it was originally written. And other pieces are timeless. I constantly revisit to figure out what's timeless and what's not.

I keep everything. The poem fragments, the cringe-worthy pieces, the pieces that make me say out loud when I read them, "Damn I'm good!"

A friend from high school and I got to talking about how we both write poetry, although neither one of us knew this about the other when we were in high school. She shared some of her work with me. I dug through my poems, trying to figure out what I wanted to share with her. I'm like Erykah Badu: "Keep in mind that I'ma artist, and I'm sensitive about my shit." Heh.

I showed her "Project Feel Good" and "Poetry Has Left Me Hanging." I purposely stayed away from pieces like "(with)drawing restraint" or "Senses." I felt that they said too much. At least right now.

And that's poetry. In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks talks about "coming to voice" and poetry.

For me, poetry was the place for the secret voice, for all that could not be directly stated or named, for all that would not be denied expression. Poetry was privileged speech -- simple at times, but never ordinary. The magic of poetry was transformation; it was words changing shape, meaning and form. Poetry was not mere recording of the way we southern black folks talked to one another, even though our language was poetic. It was transcendent speech. IT was meant to transform consciousness, to carry the mind and heart to a new dimension.

I read that book for a class in graduate school, and when I got to that part, I highlighted, I underlined, I put a page flag (still there). bell said everything I'd always felt about poetry. I'm always torn, because I want to publish and share selected pieces. I used to do it more than I do now. And actually, some of my best pieces are ones where I really bring the pain, and am really open. But at the same time, I know that I've documented every major phase of my life since I was 14 in either my journal or through my poetry. And I'm still working on my comfort level, on trying to decide which things I want to share.

Poetry is different from other types of writing. The process of writing it can really open you up.

It's one of my favorite things ever. LOL And I'm writing a lot lately.