My brain is changing. I sound dramatic. Maybe I should say I’m listening to my brain. My learning needs are different now than they were when I was last in school. So now I spend way more time reading more slowly. I aim for pdfs of most of my reading so I can highlight what’s important to me. I write extensive notes. I craft the beginnings of papers and essays well before they are due. I read through the instructions over and over again.
And still somehow I don’t completely digest the instructions. So I end up overworking my assignments, pulling too much supplemental information, and bulking up my works cited page. I can’t help it. These tendencies are showing up in my poetry too, where I find myself grasping at multiple ideas, textures, memories and finding some microscopic thread that travels through each.
When I was younger I could smell a book and know what was in it. I could do without sleep and still ace a test. I could grasp at some small suggestion and, from there, pull out a fairly good poem.
This semester has been challenging for me because most of the courses I am taking are outside of my direct program and so the reading load is much higher, the interactions between students more involved, and I’m not working on my own creative writing. Instead I’m looking at theory and voices outside of my immediate reading circle and working hard to understand them.
It’s challenging but somehow it comes together. And this new way of approaching my academic work is impacting my creative writing. My process becomes a kind of complicated hermit crab, where I end up blending narrative, dreams, longer syntax, a question or two, and monostiches. I reach wide and the writing takes longer. I sit with a piece longer too, consider its tone, the narrator voice. The extra time it’s taken me to complete individual poems has me question my writing sometimes but I make myself sit with it, past the discomfort, to end up with pieces that bring together everything and anything that comes across my space.
But there’s a kind of joy in letting pieces come to me in a moment of enlightenment. Recent ideas I’m still thinking through:
Coatlicue/Mother Earth calling out into the world through the deafening sound of cicadas.
Walt Whitman’s initial distrust of Mexicans and his later apology.
I’m in a wildfire hazard zone. Just north, rains and tornadoes. I remember driving toward Brownsville as a hurricane was expected to descend. I remember Alligator Alley and the Seminole artisans lining the highway. I remember the line of pines and a rainstorm north of them along the Blues Trail, just north of Robert Johnson’s crossroads. I remember the ominous feeling of the concrete barriers in New Orleans.
A 94 year old woman who donated her body to my daughter’s medical school, who was treasured by the students because she had an intact uterus and had never had children. This is almost impossible to see for women this age given the high expectations for childbirth and hysterectomies. Each semester the students complete a ceremony for those who donated their body.
“Crying is part of my pedagogy.” by Alexandra Nichole Salazar
A slow revelation of stories centered on my body, as in “Table of Figures” by Brenda Miller
My father’s eyes, nearly unblinking, almost foreign, like oiled white plastic sheeting funneling into shadows.
I learned a new Latin/Caribbean rhythm for my djembe that flows like water. The pacing and the back and forth of my hands across the cow skin warms my hands and relaxes my mind.
Some of these moments may not show for weeks. I like holding them in my brain and on a page. They wait until other ideas come through to form conversation with them. It’s a kind of community building of words. The anticipation of which, even with more necessary work, enlivens me.