Style & Narrative Voice

A warning: I would like to apologize in advance if this post is rather rambling or doesn't make much sense - I'm attempting to talk about something that I rarely articulate to others.

As I've been posting more of my poetry on here, I've had a couple of people express concern about the themes and tones expressed in my writing. I sometimes forget how dark my writing is, especially for people less familiar with my writing, since those who usually read what I write have been reading it for years, and know how I tend to write, and which themes I return to. 

First, I wanted to draw a distinction between my own, personal voice, and my narrative voice. Out of all the poems which I've put up under the 'Poetry' page on this blog, only one, "Rain" is actually written from my perspective. For the rest, the narrative voice, even when written in the first person, is not actually me. I'm not sure whether or not this is exactly a common thing in poetry, but generally, I write a lot of my poetry in the first person, but rarely from a narrator that I would describe as myself. 

Second, while I consider myself a generally upbeat and optimistic person, my writing, and even my visual art, my drawings, have always tended towards very dark themes and imagery (my Dad's constant response in high school when I showed him my art projects was "where are the bunnies?" - my attempt to draw a bunny for him resulted in the creepiest bunny I've ever seen, which probably says more about my ability to draw bunnies than any intentional adherence to my main artistic voice). I'd have a hard time articulating why - it certainly is something that I'm drawn to in the media that I consume, from books to television shows. Its also not a new thing - while those elements are certainly less... well articulated, or perhaps just less graphically described in my earlier poetry, its certainly there. Judeo-Christian imagery, ideas of evil, sin, and redemption, as well as imagery involving the grotesque, body horror, and psychological discontent are themes which draw me back again and again. I remember having a conversation with my creative writing group in 2012 where everyone was talking about how they used to write poem after poem about nature, and, thinking back, that has never been something that I've written about except when, by external assignment or internal desire to expand, I did (and it was usually fairly awful, and felt disingenuous and unnatural to write). Writing about things such as nature is just not something that comes naturally (heh) to me. Why I find these themes so fascinating is not something that I want to get into right now (or necessarily entirely understand in some cases), but it does not mean that my view on the world external to my writing is based on those ideas. 

Its interesting, I think, to look back on my really old writing, because even in my poetry from middle school, you can see those themes beginning to emerge, though in a much less evolved state. I think I've reached a relatively stable place in terms of my writing as of second year of university, not that my writing isn't still evolving (it really is) but I think that was the time in which my writing really concentrated down into what interests me the most, what continues to fascinate me, and was also the time where my narrative voice really begin to solidify. Its from that point on that I've begun working on poems for years, sometimes going back to things I've written years previously and editing them, but still being able to work with the content and sentence structures, something which I certainly couldn't do with my poetry earlier than that point. For example. one of the poems I've posted, "Burn", which I am immensely proud of and think it is one of the most solid poems in terms of being really true to my voice, and tightly edited in addition to that, was edited from a poem titled "Skeleton" that I had written two years prior, and is utterly unrecognizable from that original poem (which was awful) but kept a lot of the same images and phrasings such as "toppling our frames like houses" (I don't have a digital copy of that poem anymore - no real loss - so I can't do any sort of interesting comparison between the two). 

I do realize that my style of writing certainly isn't for everyone. But this is what I write, this is the way that I love to craft words, and it is in this way that words just pour out, shaping and creating themselves, and while I would love to write more cheerful poems to stop freaking out so many people (literally, everyone in my creative writing group (one of them once told me my poetry was disgusting), people on facebook, family, friends...), I would rather stick to what I feel passionate about, rather than what I would have to force. However, I will be reevaluating whether or not I want to keep posting them on here, or just restrict my poem sharing to the 'Poetry' page. 

This has been long and not altogether coherent, so, in conclusion, I'm going to share a couple of poems from a very long time ago, which are... kind of embarrassing. 

While I don't have a date for this first set, I'm pretty sure they are from middle school sometime:

Haunting

Distain rang clear in her cold gaze,

Penetrating his mind’s cloudy haze.

As night draws near, the shadows wake,

Echoing hearts fires, destined to take,

The life from love and the love of life.

Piercing hope with a subtle knife.

A Death of Regret

A word, a thought, a rhyme unspoken.

Lives and dreams, shattered and broken.

A wisp, a ghost, a silver token.

Dying and drowning in the darkest ocean.

Well, that was... I sure was trying real hard... 0_0  This last set would have been written in 2007:

Insanity

The roaring cacophony of a million dying stars screaming out in pain.

Washes away the dreary drip of life.

And you cackle as you dip into the sweet realms of insanity.

The floating flotilla of life, death, and reason disappears.

And you dive under, embracing the madness of it all.

Weaving in and out of the stars and moon.

Haunting your dreams; following lovers in and out of nothing.

Lost in the world weary moaning of a thousand chained souls.

A rebel without a cause, a heaven without a hell, an angel without a soul.

A man without a god.

Drip

Drip

Drip

And find.

Alone.

Abandoned.

Unwanted.

That you can no longer understand the simple words which form our tongues.

So you turn to them.

Swallowing their lies like the sweet nectar of the gods.

Until all you think is order.

Life, in General

The night: revelers dance the street,

pounding to the savage beat.

Glittering glass, shattered shreads,

petticoats and torn threads.

Masks hide your grotesque face,

devils wrapped in delicate lace.

The beat, the song, the drink, the night,

shining creatures of delight.

The blood, the booze, the bourgeoisie,

insanity warping cold reality.

Pounding, churning, whirling,

strangers dance, couples twirling.

Disease, death, pain, forgot,

memories left to rot.

The raging torrent; life below,

forgotten mans enraged glow.