“Great Barrier Reef”
She mouths at the inscription.
Curves brows, “Dad…what’s that?”
Can a short story be haiku?
Remember?
Tag: poetry
St. John’s Wort, a review
It’s hard to say what Alexus imagined when she titled this book, St. John’s Wort. It’s the name of a European medicinal shrub known for treating depression. Like most of the world, if you consider the book at face value, you’ll think it’s therapeutic, that it calms and elevates your experiences.
It does.
However, as you read through the poems, over and over again, to make sure you don’t miss a beat or the depth of meaning folded neatly in between lines and stanzas, you’ll realise that Mayo Clinic was perhaps right. As one of the top possible side effects of St. John’s wort (the shrub), it lists agitation. Which is what you feel when you’ve read these poems.
Alexus doesn’t look at the world around her and burst into flowery language. Instead, her poems are deliberate. Each line, each syllable rings with meaning, and whether or not you directly relate to it, you feel what she sees, and you see what she feels.
Imagery is for the ear as much as it is for the eye, you learn as she describes in Laughter,
“I know God laughed
when night bathed tabletop-
tabletop cradled the New York Times, a pound cake. I sang carols over the brushed, high-hat hiss of a Vanilla Coke can.”
Alexus’s poetry isn’t simple. Layers upon layers of complexity lie in each poem, and she makes you work to reap the sweet benefits of the sadness lingering in those hard words.
“When I learned my father had an aneurysm, I thought about the day his brother had the aneurysm.
I thought about Plath, then Hughes
then about how suddenly I needed to buy pudding
from the grocery store.”
When referencing a father dying of aneurysm, not everyone draws a parallel with Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy“, where she confesses struggling to forgive her father’s involvement in the Holocaust and his lack of self-care that resulted in a gradual demise. Alexus cleverly matches the Plath reference with the seemingly related Hughes, while instead, with a subtle streak, alluding to pulmonary artery aneurysms, a rare autoimmune disease first described by British physicians Hughes and Stovin.
Good poetry resounds though your being, leaving blotches of reality, like ink on paper, marking you for life. This collection of poems takes it further—you have to marvel at Alexus’s wordliness, the way she’s melded poetry with dark reality, and the way she’s dejargoned medicine, revealing it in bits, like droplets on whiskey, just enough to hit you with a boldness that momentarily disarms you.
It’s not, however, a book you need to pair with a high-edition dictionary—although a nice Riesling surely complements. Scattered throughout the book, in snippets that speak the truth as it is, are poems so simple and so pristine that you can’t help but pause to inhale the beauty of words.
“What among us won’t, one day,
Be turned inside out?”
She asks in such tepidity that it strikes you, slices through your pretence, as intense as hot knife through cold butter.
Alexus ends that poem, Year of the Rabbit Hole, hinting at self-help, while artfully voiding her voice of the unworthiness that comes with such books.
This collection is a chain, flaunting a range of topics, all bound by the string of tragedy. Every poem is an ode to an incident in life—sometimes personal, often not—leaving you with a shudder, questioning you, and enticing you to question the world you see.
Musings from reading St. John’s Wort, a poetry collection written by Alexus Erin and published by Animal Heart Press.
The undeniable cycle of writing
I’m a marketer. Even though I have no formal degree in marketing, over the last six years, my work experience has taught me many things. One of those, which is also regarded as the most important, is knowing your audience.
I write marketing copy for the web. And that means I need to know my audience. I need to identify who exactly I’m talking to and speak to them in their language. My tone, choice of words, and even the length of my sentences depend on the capacity of my audience. Absolute precision in words and messaging is necessary. No compromises. Every piece I write begins with an audience analysis.
But then, I also write poetry. And poetry doesn’t have an audience.
Curious contrast, eh?
I attended at a poetry festival recently, and while discussing about who they write for and why, a group of panelists unanimously agreed that they write for themselves. At least at first. And that’s the underlying truth for all forms of art. No one starts creating art because they have an audience waiting for it They start because they can’t keep it in themselves any longer.
I write short stories, poems, and random ramblings (like this one) because I have to get them out somehow. Creative writing is an outlet, a necessary drain to flush down the overflowing ideas and thoughts that’d otherwise clog my brain and leave me a walking pile of stink.
Therefore when I write, I write for myself. I write to make myself feel better, to clear my chest, and to put my mind at ease. And through that inane need to pop the bulging bubble in my head, I end up creating an audience that relates to whatever I put on paper.
Still, even though I write these poems and stories to satisfy my own needs, they also need a platform. Sometimes I’m happy to tuck my work away from the rest of the world, but more often than not, I want to share my work with others, to thrill them just as my favourite writers thrill me.
As long as I only want to write stuff and don’t care if anyone reads them at all, I don’t have to worry about marketing. But the moment I let my ambition get the better of me, the moment I crave acknowledgement and recognition even, I need to start thinking about audience and how to say what I want to say in a way that makes them want my work. Therefore comes marketing.
My point: Marketing is everywhere. And we all have to market ourselves at some point. Can’t say I like the idea, but can’t deny it either.
Writing is living
I was attending a panel discussion about poetry when someone mentioned how research is a great way to accumulate ideas, facts, and anecdotes, and how during the process of writing a poem, you learn to strip out the unnecessary details and keep only what makes your piece worth reading.
That got me thinking. Planning for a story, a poem, or a novel is all about collecting random information in one place. It’s essential prep work. And only when you have that massive pile of overwhelming information can you condense it and identify key elements that add value to your work.
Unless we go through that rigorous cutting of the bulk in our work, the piece itself will sag under the weight of too much information. What we once deemed good becomes its downfall.
Life is like that too.
We all spend so much time and money acquiring things—books, furniture, clothes, jewellery, bags, shoes, and so much more that take up and over our lives. We don’t realise these things are baggages that can hold us back.
Just as in writing, the solution is to get rid of what we don’t need.
To live minimally, so we reduce our impact on our surroundings, and be aware of ourselves. Makes for a quick getaway too. To do all that, we need to get rid of the possessions we so lovingly accumulate. It isn’t easy, and to paraphrase Faulkner, it’s like killing your darlings. But if we want the result to be worthy at all, it has to be done.
There’s a process
I’ve always thought poetry was self-expression. And so for a long time, whenever I sat down to write, I let my emotions reverberate through my bones, ebb into my fingers, and onto the screen.
It seemed like the natural thing to do, and any alliteration, assonance, or metre that came with it was an added advantage—a happy co-incidence. Certainly not a concentrated, contrived effort on my part.
Then I learnt my idea of poetry was total bonkers.
Sure, I still write when the muse takes over my mind and I don’t have to work as hard to string words into meaning. However, I also met people, actual poets, who’ve published in many esteemed places, talk about the process of writing poetry.
There’s a process?
Indeed, there is. From a couple of panel discussions at the Poetry on the Move festival, and from many observations that dawned on me during the weekend, I’ve realised that poetry doesn’t just hit you like a flash of lightening in a storm-studded sky.
Instead, it’s a conscious effort to twist memory and wring out emotions within, to recollect and relive life instances, of the time we knocked into a tree, too busy looking at the phone, and of the next time we attempted to consciously sidestep the tree only to realise that was gone—sacrificed, cut down for construction.
A poet I heard recently said she needs at least three hours to write one poem.
That’s when it hit me. Art, regardless of form, isn’t subconscious. It’s meticulous and deliberately delicate.
The world seldom respects that.
The Chaos Within 