4/23/2024

Hardcore Slump: Week 3 of National Poetry Month

Week three. We are twenty-three poems deep into the month and, folks, the tank is just about empty. I'm starting to burn out, feeling and fearing the weak sparks of my brain continuing to write over and over on the same topic. On the one hand, no one is holding my hand to the page, but on the other I feel like I owe it to myself to finish precisely because I'm closer to finishing this cycle than I ever have been. It doesn't make the feeling of sitting down with my keyboard or pen and notebook any less demanding, only more urgent, which makes feeling stuck even sharper and more unbearable.

My most recent salvation from the unholy feeling of Stuckness came this weekend when my girlfriend invited me out to a local hardcore show. Some bands were traveling from out of town and a five-bill gig got thrown together. Unsurprisingly, I am not typically a hardcore fan, but I wanted an excuse to leave the house (and put off writing the day's poem).

Immediately, within the first seconds of the first band I was glad I came. There was a chaos to the noise, to the sudden and undeniable shift in the room.

When a hardcore band starts, the room goes quiet, save for the building whine bleeding out of the amplifiers, and then. And then the fucking noise, friends. Roiling oceans of sound teeming with tentacular nightmarish schools of notes and percussive blasts. The singers scream and each syllable is a water droplet that blasts out like a firehose. The drummers are fighting a war in 4/4 time. The strings are a frenetic whine that doesn’t even feel like strumming so much as strangling a live cobra. Each song is a burst of chaotic violence, but my girlfriend is quick to remind me that despite the crashing and roaring of the music, everyone is tight and playing together.

Even when the lead vocalists are moshing with the fans and thrashing the floor and literally leaping off the stacked speakers, there is control. How they manage this is the adoption of a needful truth: they invite and accept chaos.

They don't try to be perfect.

For me, in all my poetry and writing and perfectionism, this notion was revolutionary. I try so hard to limit my frenetic energy and my tantrums to the privacy of my home. I tend to think of my writing process like a howling forge, all the noise and fire in the world, but at the end, a quiet, brilliant piece of steel. Fire, for me, is the freedom to throw my notebook across the room when nothing comes to me or to practically vibrate my laptop with shouted swear words. The possibility of integrating the frenzy of my process, unafraid, into my work feels like a betrayal, but one I must make to get better.

One of my favorite songs is "I Put a Spell On You." It's just so beautiful, desperate, sinister and lovely. My favorite version is Nina Simone's. Something about her voice and the hunger inherent to the act of magic just makes sense. The way she sings "I love you" near the end of the song is the closest we've ever come to the sound of loneliness itself. Nina brings a classical discipline to even her emotional resonance in the song.

Conversely, there's the Screaming Jay Hawkins version. Soaked in a near-lethal amount of booze, it's completely unmoored. Hawkins slurs his words, he shouts, he warbles and screams, but none of these "mistakes" hinder the momentum or artistry of his version either.

I don't need to illustrate why trying to "be Nina" in my writing is a fool's errand. I've been chasing perfection too long. Watching people sweat and shred and slam their instruments with trembling hands reminded me that, at least in the drafting process, I need to be more Screaming Jay.

I need to be bold.

Whenever I feel completely hopeless, I pull up a picture of one of my favorite pieces of art in the world: Ellsworth Kelly's Green Curve. Something about its frank and unrepetant commitment to itself soothes me. It is not trying to be more than it is. It is not hindered by a frame or a context. By being so green, so curved, so perfectly itself, it challenges even the white wall of the museum on which it hangs.

I want to write like that. I want to stand against the white wall and be so fearlessly, purely myself that I change the room around me. When I was waffling around about how to arrange my manuscript, I stared at the Curve and immediately realized how I was holding myself back.

I was playing it safe.

I promised myself I would write these poems about my breasts with no regard if they were accessible. I told myself I would treat it like an exercise. Lately I've been wrapped up in whether or not the various contexts of my tits would be interesting to a reader, editing myself even in the writing process. That is not Screaming Jay. That is not Green Curve. That's not hardcore.

I realize now that I'm being chickenshit, despite my best efforts. If these poems find any audience at all, it will be through the lens of my authentic interest in them. I am fascinated by my tits in the bathroom mirror, in old t-shirts, in so many places I feared were too quotidian to write about.

I will use this judgmental silence, this awkward pause to plug in my instruments, to crank up the amps, and spill a joyous chaos tempered by playful control. I will curve and slope so greenly and purely that no frame can contain me. I will put a spell on you, because you're mine.

And, I suppose, too, that I am

Yours with an open mouth,

-B