Author: brieflywrite

The Moment

Halle George

When blood
becomes ink
and the skin over the tattoo has healed

When the police report
becomes a story you tell at cocktail parties
with just the right pauses to sound light and tinkly as the glasses you sip from

When nobody is looking for you anymore
When you have ceased to be a beating heart
When you are only a statistic kept in a file cabinet no one ever bothers to clean

When you realize
feeling the pain of the needle
having to tell your own story
being the last one who remembers
Makes you one of the lucky ones

I interpreted “essay” loosely; There’s no set process that turns life into art, it’s a thousand little moments.

Halle George has previously been published in Midsummer’s Eve and shortlisted for the Briefly Write Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles but still has a Boston accent.

Ouroboros

Debra Williams

I am Ouroboros – my end is in my beginning and my beginning begets my end. The page’s linear structure cannot reflect the intertwinedness of thought and experience, scoured into the body, carded in the mind, spun onto the page; or how meaning struggles to be voiced, pulsing against unseen, unyielding bars – the mind’s cage alert for any transgressions, any shows of self – searching for a space to shimmer through. To roll and flow and glow on the page, to share – not too much, just enough, don’t let them see the real you; to reach out for what: Acknowledgement? Approval? Achievement? Acceptance?

But the reaching is circular not linear; in the end – and in the beginning – all that can be known is the self. The lines that stretch down the page finish; the eyes that scan them move on. And I, Ouroboros, suck on my tail, flex my unshed scales for the transmigration to come, and begin again.

Considering the prompt, ‘ouroboros’ flashed into my mind and words flowed from graphite in a fever-dream of inspiration. The wool-making metaphor also arose naturally – I just fact-checked when editing. A strange but satisfying departure from my usual style.

Debra Williams is a published writer (e.g. Free Flash Fiction) who also enjoys telling her work in a storytelling group. She blogs about Merseyside’s natural world.

Can you catch the setting sun?

Ian Ledward

The person ends when they are smitten with what is wrongly thought of as an illness. Just as someone might be described as love sick without actually being ill, another person might be described as word sick.

The state of poetry is born out of the development of the condition known as Poetas Morbos, or the Poet’s Malady. This self-induced chronic condition, rooted in the central nervous system of some human beings, can manifest itself at any time during an individual’s life. It can develop in early childhood through and might continue into old age. Symptoms of euphoria or even profound melancholy can sometimes result. For example, the boy poet, Thomas Chatterton committed suicide, dying in poverty and in despair in 1770 at the age of seventeen. For some, this state can continue over lengthy periods, sometimes decades.

There is no permanent cure for this poet’s malady although temporary cessation is possible if the secondary condition, Scriptoris Obstructionum, Writer’s Block, occurs. This may develop as a result of irregular synaptic transmissions caused by the overworking of a tired brain and an emptied mind. Not normally associated with any physical pain, some sufferers have described sensations of internal burning and silent screaming when words will not even form, while teardrops of frustration fall across an empty page.

Neither Poetas Morbos nor Scriptoris Obstructionum have been observed in other primates, though some research suggests that it may exist in whales.

There is something that drives us in this business of writing; poetry in particular. It has much to do with the processes of aging, medication and the how the mind responds to these.

Ian Ledward is a professional artist and published writer living in Fife. He is a member of Fife Writes and the Open University Poetry Society.

On Beginnings: Person and Poem

Jayant Kashyap

The question: Where does the person end and the poem begin? The answer: It’s elementary, really! In the simplest terms, a poem lives long, longer than a person does. Longer than any person who reads or writes a poem does. When it comes to it, a poem begins with the person that first writes it, but as soon as the writing is done, or the poem has begun taking a certain shape and structure, or course, let’s say – and with someone else reading the poem – the person ends or, simply, leaves. The poem has now attained a freedom for itself, one unlike anything. It can now identify itself as an individual entity, one that – although will often be attributed to the person that wrote it – doesn’t need a “creator”/“mother”/“god” to exist and to be understood anymore, the latter being the sole purpose of existence for most of us.

So, in essence, a poem begins long before itself and not with the inevitable tercets, quatrains, and whatnots. Its inception comes with the occurrence of an event – or a series of events, fortunate or otherwise – in someone’s life, after which the said “someone”, or, if not themselves, an acquaintance of theirs, becomes merely a medium between the poem and the world that is to perceive it –and, sometimes, even before all of that, before the little moments of the perceived event. That is when a poem begins, and all else happens thereafter. A poem, however, never obliviates, and is never forgotten.

Most of this essay is the idea that comes at the beginning of writing (in this case, the idea that poetry is forever in motion and never transient, that it isn’t limited to the boundaries that a poet creates but jumps those quite often) and the rest is presentation – to choose what to put, and where, while maintaining the integrity of the thought

Jayant Kashyap, a poet, essayist, translator and artist, has published two pamphlets and a zine. His work appears in POETRY, Magma, Poetry Wales and elsewhere.

Writers Making Space

Lawrence Bradby

Have you ever stayed in a house where written instructions are attached to every tap and switch and key and kitchen drawer?

            SPOONS, FORKS, NO SHARP KNIVES

                HOT WATER BOOSTER (turn off after)

                    PLASTIC BAGS ONLY

You’re cat-sitting, or popping in daily to water the plants, or in fact your friend is only out for the evening but they can’t imagine how you, or any other visitor, will cope without advice at every point. 

The lyric poem is a dwelling place. It is made so that the reader’s memories and emotions can enter, move round, settle in. This poem-dwelling is rich with details that are personal and warm, like a chair from which someone has just stood up. The poet placed these details to bear the weight of what the reader brings. The poet does not label every detail or remind the reader what they’re for. The poet has already stepped back, allowing the poem to begin, to come to life. Author Michael Schmidt calls this ‘the withdrawal of the self’, leaving space for the reader to ‘fill out and create’.

Promoting the poet as the definitive reader of their own work can stop the poem from letting in its readers. When The Poetry Archive, for example, offers free access to ‘recordings of significant poets reading their work aloud’ there is a price. The price we pay, as readers, is that the poet doesn’t step away, doesn’t find the line between themselves and their poem, doesn’t run their knife along that line. 

Writing my piece, I thought about how a poem is like a new word: no matter who created it, it belongs more to the field of language than to the particularities of the author’s life

Since October 2020, Lawrence Bradby has lived in Portugal. He writes a blog about the challenges and surprises of finding a way to belong. 

Fire & Heat

Sarang Bhand

I would like to humbly disagree with the idea of a person/poet and poem being separate in the first place. Borrowing an analogy from Vedanta’s teaching of ancient seers, I would like to state that ‘As one cannot separate clay from the earthen pot, one cannot separate a poem from the person/poet.’

A person is the sum total of their ego which is limited to their experiences in life. It is these experiences of life that nourish thoughts and these thoughts in turn act as the catalyst that germinates a poem. Whether it is melancholy or joy, the degree of it is unique to the person experiencing these and the person/poet expresses these emotions in their unique voice in the form of a poem.

Maybe there is an element of commonality in the themes of experiences experienced by different persons and there is a commonality of emotions that we all experience as humans. Maybe that’s why we perceive a piece of poetry to transcend beyond the person/poet when it gets related by others. But the language used, the selection of words to craft that poem, and the intended meaning conceived within the poem still belongs to the person/poet who chose to express them under specific circumstances of their life experiences. And thus, in my humble opinion, a poem cannot be separated from the person who crafted it. A person/poet and the poem are inseparable as fire & heat. A poem cannot begin where the person ends.

It was an interesting prompt and almost instinctively I chose to respond on how I felt about the statement. I wanted to have an objective approach to support my instinct and thus I attempted to deduce the relation between a person/poet and their poetry. Keeping it brief was a bit challenging but then brevity is the sharpest arrow in a poet’s quiver.

Sarang Bhand is an entrepreneur working in the clean-tech space. When he is not troubleshooting projects, he likes to explore writing, photography & painting. See his bio here and writings here.

Who owns poetry?

Beattie

In 1963, Sylvia Plath died. Her estate passed to her husband, Ted Hughes. By 2003, Ted Hughes was dead and Frieda Hughes, their daughter, became literary executor of both estates.

In 2003, a film about Plath, Sylvia, was released. Frieda Hughes was not keen. She refused requests to take part and denied filmmakers the right to use Plath’s poetry. In her poem “My Mother,” Hughes writes of being asked to “give them my mother’s words / To fill the mouth of their monster / Their Sylvia Suicide Doll.”

My critique is not with Hughes’ assessment of the film. Sylvia leans heavily into the trope of Plath as a “witchy death goddess,” as identified by biographer Heather Clark. Gwyneth Paltrow, playing Plath, is perpetually nervous, brittle. I doubt that the presence of the poems would solve this issue, but their absence surely worsens it.

Rather, my critique is with the model of ownership. Frieda Hughes did not write those poems. I do not wish to single her out. I do not object to her profiting from Plath’s work, not least because of the repeated tragedy she has endured in being Plath and Hughes’ daughter. But I object to monopoly. In the absence of the poet herself, the poems live on in the reader. And I believe in the right of readers to respond to those poems, even when that response is a frankly terrible film.

I attended a workshop on ‘Plath as poetic inspiration’. Faber, managing Plath’s estate, only granted permission for a session *about* Plath. We could not look at Plath’s actual poems, only poems responding to her. This sparked questions about poetry and ownership. 

Beattie is a writer and lapsed drag queen from Merseyside. You can follow them on twitter (@poofter_pontiff).

Syllables’ Irreverent Borders

Thomas Mixon

There are moments when I’m something outside language. In these grunts, gasps, these gaps where, yes, there may be thought, but no words, there can be no poem. Poems may begin in spaces absent of intention, but they take shape in syntax.

I come to an end, so many thousand times a year. I pause, listening, my ears flexed, quivering as feee-beee morphs to something I call chirp, as whoooosh changes to bird, inside my mind. I fall asleep, I eat, conceive of nothing as I crunch my way through Corn Chex.

Whitman may have wanted the United States to be his poem, but a poem can’t be a place any more than I can. As I live inside a country, a poem is resident to syllables’ irreverent borders.

My favorite time to be a poet is while swimming – every third breath my head emerges from the pond. Sometimes I zone out, exist in images untethered to specific pitches. But often, the literal splashing rhythms conjure phrases, in an urgent triple meter. If I do not write it down, it’s still a poem, since there are nouns and verbs nestled together. I hesitate to call it order, or logical, but it isn’t random.

It was a phoebe, I was hearing. An animal we named after the noises that it makes. I reach my hand, sing out. But it’s gone. When I am in the ground, the poems I’ve made will still reverberate because they have a home, in sound.

A sentence is a set of steps next to a sometimes wobbly railing. If one of us falls, will the other reach out? Will we eschew carpentry, or learn to carry nails?

Thomas Mixon has fiction and poems published in Rattle, Sundog Lit, At Length, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter (@truckescaperamp).

Self-Portrait as a Poem

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

I am sitting in my study, the words of Anne Carson’s book, Autobiography of Red, before me. My reading lamp sits illumined: my way of euphemizing that I’m merely reading a book and not divulging into the life of a seclusive persona.

As I read, I am overwhelmed by a myriad of emotions; happiness and sadness, death and life into a perfect mish-mash. I reason Carson could not have experienced this. How could she? She was a mortal with an elastic endurance!

The pages, as white as fleece, bleed the tears of a woman in agony and I can smell so clearly the putrid stench of crimson oozing.

Sometimes, I wonder if she was as honest as this – an open book. Did she want to publish this book or was her life just the right “fiction” readers wanted to feast their cinematic eyes upon?

All I know for sure is before me lies a woman supposed to be cremated, the pages her skin and the words her innards.

I am dissecting her, looking for something undefined. How could I find a story in a woman when she was the story?

I dig into her like an archeologist in search of buried secrets. I do not apologize for my discourteous infringement.

As I read, I imagine, if in a conversation, would she be as intimate and open as this.

But isn’t this where it bridges, the poem defying to be just a poem.

Poetry to me is more or less a confession, a metaphorical bloodletting. It defiles revealing the poet’s blood only and instead seeks to bleed

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi,TPC XI, is an African writer whose works particularly present a social commentary on the intersectionality between memory, language, identity, religion and selfhood.

Tracks, flight-paths and bee-lines

Karen Macfarlane

Where implies a place, a location, a point you can reach, and exist, and leave. While the ‘where’ of this question is obviously a metaphorical place, it can at least be imagined as though it were a physical one. Let’s suggest it might be a clearing in a big old wood, with lots of paths leading to and from it, from marked rights of way down to rabbit tracks, not forgetting flight-paths and bee-lines. The ways in and out of this clearing are important, because when we consider the person who begins and ends here, there is not only one person.

There’s the poet, who carried their poem along the pathways of their life to leave it here; and all the readers who have arrived on their own paths from different starting points. You could imagine the poem creating an image within this clearing, maybe a shaft of sunlight falling on an oak leaf on the forest floor. Every person who sees it will have their own viewpoint and this may change, depending on the path they arrived on today. And that brings me to my point: that this place will be constantly shifting a little, this point where the people involved in the poem begin and end, and the poem takes on a life of its own. Because all life exists in relation to the other lives around it; a poem, if it’s alive in any way, most of all.

The question immediately made me think of a physical place and I found it interesting to have a metaphor to explore the subject. I’ve worked in healthcare for 30 years and have to write very concise case notes, so writing briefly comes naturally.

Karen Macfarlane is studying for a BA in Creative Writing. Her poetry appears in magazines including Poetry Scotland, Spelt, Green Ink and The Poets’ Republic. See more.