We asked the poets to write a poem without "I"
*Cover photo: Lion attacking horse by Théodore Géricault (1820) as seen at the Louvre*
Summer blows in funny, funny and yet the poets arrive at the book and bar, the poets reach for words, the city holds us tightly in stagnant air and we circulate love like a community should. When I am tired, I consider myself lucky. Lucky, at least, on the fourth Wednesday of the month where the Workshop meets in the West End.
The Wizard arrived before I had, out for a smoke and in the universe w/ a joke. I parked around the corner just after 6:30 and made my way humid to Novel w/ books of poetry in my bag half distracted. Boxes and boxes of t-shirts for sale, MC wearing one oversized w/ heels, in black and running the show. I had the clipboard in my bag that wouldn’t close, extra pens for whoever needed one. I sat w/ a calm clarity that has eluded me this summer. The Wizard flips the tape, from the carry-out speaker sounds of the ocean while notebooks open and chairs get dragged closer together.
We pulled more seats up from the storage as more poets filtered in and the list grew. We had a karaoke microphone and invited everyone out to the Jewel Box to sing when the show was over. The Wizard wore the shirt they got from the Lew show, cyanotype on the back. I wore the oversized vintage tee that I woke up in and vintage knit pants w/ holes in them. Friends sit facing the microphone like blooms cropping up along the driveway, one by one by one, perking up in the sun.
The prompt had come from an assignment I had in college, back in New York where I was nothing, to write a poem w/out the pronoun “I” - to take the singular identity out of the voice it’s meant for. This summer, poetry has been on the other side of the fence, staring at me through the green, made of magic and deeply boring. I go to my community to try something new together, to take myself out of the story and find how we all fit together. We sent out the graphic w/ my wonky spiral eye and allowed the prompt to be taken in all its directions. Seven poets out of 21 interpreted the prompt on Hard Mode — writing poems w/ no I’s at all, making room for other vowels and other perspectives. Each of us part of the formal We, the plural you, the collective Here & Now.
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I N T H E R E C O R D I N G
Both the Wizard and I both brought two poems to read. I spent Wednesday morning w/ coffee and my poetry collection. On the kitchen floor I sat in front of the ladder bookshelf I glued together in college. I was looking for poems w/out the I pronoun, it was taking longer than I expected it to. Crumbs on the ground, flipping through and having a little fun.
I pulled Ocean Vuong and dusted off Night Sky W/ Exit Wounds. The poet’s voice disassociated and reading life like a riddle, pain transcribed into folk tale, short and staring. Before I left, I pulled Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind as well. In this collection of poems, the poet’s voice becomes passive as the wind, keeping the world wild. I was inspired by the poet laureate’s approach while writing my piece for the month so it only felt right to bring her into the conversation again. Vuong floats above the body. Limon embodies fur and claw and feather w/ respect.
The Wizard had friends to honor. I read about the fox and thought about them. They read about pens of destiny and thought about me. The Wizard read two poems from a late friend, a meaningful mentor, an eternal guiding light, a friend like an angel and poems left to Earth. We had to laugh every time we read the word eye, poking at our rules and the thrill of adjacent breaking. Eye & eye & I & I and all of us melting into collective sight.
The afternoon, the Wizard texted me saying that they had just landed in the city and had to write their piece. Around and around they puffed and poked their head into local shops w/ anarchist flyers. Through the open door, the Wizard wandered and wrote. I circled the block looking for parking, reading the Wizard’s text, i’ve still got to write something for tonight, this is a really engaging prompt, btw What do poets do when they don’t know where to begin? They begin w/ Desire. The Wizard wanted to leap but found themselves circling, deciphering. Not a victim to want but kept, heavy collar around their neck but still following the scent. W/out the I, the Wizard was animal. Dreaming animal, fiending animal, hungry and sweet despite itself.
Unsurprisingly, I took a similar approach. W/out the I, I was animal. Waiting animal, reading animal, innocent through error and wanting a better world. For the last four years, I’ve been watching the horses in the field, the field down the winding road between my place and my city. I named them and watched them graze day in and day out, bookending my commute home and helping me believe in something. It was Beginnings and Extinction until Extinction was gone. Then Grace showed up, and Magic, three horses in a clover field.
I have hot coffee and something I shouldn’t, trying to coax poetry from the hole in me. I have lost sight of how far down I’m digging. My morning loses context w/ itself and then I am out the door. My hair hangs like a willow tree in the humidity and I let it. I look at the horses and I see myself a little differently. An animal in the sun and surrender.
I look at the horses and see a broken thing still wild, like I’ve been seeing me for a while. I got into horses seemingly out of the blue, when it was lockdown and I was writing to Lazlo. When I was young, I used to respect horses too much to love them. My step father had horses behind his house. An old boyfriend of mine is a farrier, the horse his father brushed in high school afternoons. Em who takes care of horses in North Carolina and Emma who rides them in Topsham. The salt and pepper horse I rode once a year w/ my father. My symbol followed M and I to Paris, to our cafe w/ the blue ink paintings of horses, to the Louvre where I photographed every one I saw, the unicorn of M’s forearm and the horse on my bicep tattooed in Montreuil on Halloween, like twins.
Horses have been a part of my home landscape but I never took to them until I felt both broken and free, trying to understand how to make peace. Horses have become symbolic of freedom and domesticity, of duality, of sweetness and strength, Americana made precious again. When I wasn’t sure how to write w/out myself, I got distracted wondering whether or not it was even possible. Instead, I wrote about horses. I read to the bar about horses. I passed the mic around, a hopeful part of the whole.
✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, be sure to follow Portland Poets Society on instagram and please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.
The Workshop VIII