applause, applause, life is our cause

Poetry rant coming your way, in which the only thing that makes me feel vaguely validated as an artist and human is also the thing that makes me feel like shit and question my future ambitions on a weekly basis. Got so long-winded, but it’s all things I needed to say, if only to myself.

My assignment this week was to write a poem relating to a public person or event. And I came up with what I felt was a quite cool and intricate idea, which was to write about Michael Jackson’s death in the style of Frank O’Hara writing about Billie Holiday’s. Because then I could somehow have my poem not just address Jackson’s death and how he’s such an icon, but it would also meditate on mortality relating to art and artists in general. Holiday and O’Hara both died relatively young too. So many layers.

But in reality, the poem I wrangled out is shoddy. For one thing, it’s a pathetic nod to O’Hara in terms of style and I’m almost embarrassed to admit that he’s who I had in mind as an inspiration. For another, all the fear and frustration about wanting to make moving art before your time just runs out that I wanted to capture in the poem is thin and superficial and not moving at all. I guess my inability to convey those feelings in poetry is why I feel so compelled to spew them out right now.

The only thing I supposedly love doing, the only thing that makes me feel theoretically fulfilled and vaguely talented and like I might actually belong at Oberlin, is also the thing that most makes me question what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

This is not a self-loathing thing. I like who I am, and how I see the world, and I value this compulsion I have to translate my vision of the world into art, because it will potentially bring me a lot of happiness and fulfillment for the rest of my life. Potentially.

I guess what I’m saying is, part of me wishes I could be satisfied with less. I am this toxic combination of perfectionist and horribly lazy douche bag, and I think I need to loosen up both ends of that spectrum because too often it leads to nonconstructive anguish.

I’ve started doing this thing where, instead of complaining about stupid inconsequential shit when I’m upset or irritated, like rehearsal or work or the weather, I try very hard to step back and mentally sort through things and figure out what’s really, deeply eating at me. And although I’ve been having a really good semester, this has been eating at me. Putting it down here doesn’t fix it, but it makes me calmer to have put it into plain words with some coherence. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll be able to thread it through my crazed looking-glass of a brain and turn it into poetry.