As
with everyone lately, my daily life and writing practice has changed quite
dramatically. I went from working full time to being house bound, and I
immediately took this as a sign that I must do the many things I had said I
wanted to do while being fully employed. The backlog of wants was (is) immense,
coming off of two years of not writing, of managing grief and the obliterating
constancy of Bipolar Disorder, which often disables my creative thinking.
After
spending years talking my way back to writing, I relied on journals I had
maintained with notes on life events, overheard conversations, misheard
conversations, images that ravished what I knew about language, that helped me
court the world in unexpected ways. I have never written on a computer. The act
of making language visible with the muscles and nerves of my hands, ink
staining my fingertips, is a ritual I cannot forgo.
Here
I am, in quarantine, trying to organize and compose the abundance of these
journals. I’m stuck, revisiting old poems on their graveyard shelves. The
tonality of my first book could be described as backed into a corner poetry; it
looked backwards with no feeling of moving forwards.
I
wanted to move away from this with my current manuscript, poems I self-deprecatingly
called ‘little misery memoirs.’ When left to the devices of the blank page and
pen, I resurrected buried traumas and memories. Every time I attempt to write
anything else, I couldn’t write at all. It felt selfish, hysterical; how could
one life contain these multitudes of misery, and why couldn’t I move on?
After
a few weeks of bargaining, I surrendered to where the poems lead me, to what I
couldn’t process outside of the page. As T.S. Eliot said, “when the poet’s mind
is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate
experience...these experiences are always forming new wholes.” The troubled authenticity that arises from my
journaled notes and blank page didn’t just recount life’s little (or big)
miseries, it complicated a straight forward narrative of trauma and
dysfunction. Time had confronted my perception and performance of trauma on the
page at the level of the line.
The
notes of pain do not devastate the truth of my own narrative, the beauty in
hardship, the love and relationships. How do we begin to navigate a world space
to heal in the present, while embracing or abandoning the past?
So
I’m starting in the middle, attempting to forget my future self, accepting line
breaks as they manifest on the page, trusting the meanings assemble in the
background on my mind.
I
can’t live my life in poems, I write poems to hopefully live life with a little
less baggage than before. I begin with hope, the poem is a gesture to healing;
the nuts and bolts seem easy when the mind cooperates.
Ashley-Elizabeth
Best is
from Kingston, ON. Her work has been published internationally in CV2, Ambit
Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada, The Columbia Review,
and Glasgow Review of Books, among others. In 2015 she was a finalist
for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and her debut collection
of poetry, Slow States of Collapse, was published with ECW Press.
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