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the road to a holiday video poem

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

The Light Between Us – José Angel Araguz

Before learning to read,
words are darkness.
What’s there
feels unseeable;
paper and ink, sure,
but nothing you feel
a part of.

The world around us
feels like this at times,
like darkness.
A harsh word, violence, pain—
we can’t read these things easily,
must wait for the darkness
to make sense.

Yet, we wait in light.
The same light
around each dark word
surges around us.

In light, we begin to hear
possibility, meaning.

A voice comes
in the light between us,
and we are surprised to learn

it is our own voice
that reads the darkness away.

*

The above was written as a first attempt at a poem to accompany a holiday video being put together by Travis McGuire, Kevin Curry, and Jeff Kennel of Linfield College’s Communications and Marketing department. I had been given a brief description of the project to serve as a prompt: To visualize a crowd of people holding either phones or candles gathering, with a planned overhead shot at the end. I was also given “light” and “darkness” as key words. I worked out the above draft with this in mind.

While I can’t speak to the merits of the above, I can say that I see why I was asked for a revision. The above, while delving into some of the prompt concepts, remains very individual, the turn at the end being a gesture towards revelation, but a personal, intimate one. In further correspondence and talks with Travis, Kevin, and Jeff, it became clear that there was a sense of community missing from the original poem, something that I kept in mind as I drafted further versions.

One of the aspects of this revision process that I enjoyed was working out a sense of “poem as script.” Behind each word choice and turn of phrase, I considered what this would be like performed as a voiceover. This consideration took me into a performance mindframe, similar to how I prepare for readings as well as to the writing process I had during my years of writing slam poetry. With performance in mind in any capacity, one is thinking about how the word lands in two ways, on the air and on the page.

Below is the final draft of the poem as well as the holiday video itself. I am proud to have collaborated with the good folks from Communications and Marketing as well as student Antoine Johnson ’19 who read the poem for the video. As the year wraps up, I feel that the message of this poem and the lessons learned between drafts are worth considering moving forward.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Holiday Poem – José Angel Araguz

The world around us
is dark at times.

Harsh words,
violence,
pain
leave us feeling alone,
isolated.

Stars, too, are isolated.
Each hangs in its own light.

The night, then, is darkness,

but when the light
from these separate,
distinct points
comes together…

When new understanding
brightens our lives,
darkness recedes.

When we come together,
we shine bright enough
to see tomorrow.

 

one more from Minadora Macheret

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

lovemeanywayIn my recent microreview & interview of Minadora Macheret’s Love Me, Anyway (Porkbelly Press), I spent time unpacking the collection’s interrogation of disbelief and the role it plays in living with disability. From the disbelief of medical professionals too quick to dismiss a person due to age and gender, to the personal disbelief of someone with PCOS struggling through the body and life changing symptoms, Macheret’s poems track the path of coming to terms with this condition. In delving into her experiences with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), Macheret makes use of context and phrasing to create poems whose clarity is charged with human consequence.

The poem “Woman with PCOS Describes Aversion to Tests” (below), is a good example of this kind of clarity. Here’s the second stanza:

Nurses prickly and sweet
stick needle after needle
into scarred flesh. There is no blood left,
no room to take me into,
where my hormones are not abnormal.

Here, the first three lines do two different things. First, they present wordplay in the way nurses are perceived as “prickly and sweet,” language that suggests the act that follows of having needles stuck into “scarred flesh.” Second, this wordplay is layered over the direct imagery of these lines, providing an emotional charge along with a clear visual. This clarity is then developed further in the following lines. Specifically, the logic of there being “no room to take me into, / where my hormones are not abnormal” is a powerful statement, made so through the contextual work the phrasing is doing. While the immediate context of the poem is a doctor’s office, the phrasing of these last two lines evokes a much larger context and makes clear the weight of the speaker’s experience, not just in the moment, but in her life.

This work is echoed in the closing lines about the heart: “this muscle beats irregularly / as long as it doesn’t stop, I’ll be fine—” Here, there is a mix of speaking of the heart in medical terms in one line and speaking of it in more ambiguous terms in the second. Yet, this ambiguity, instead of obscuring what is meant, adds richness and depth. Ambiguity is invited into the poem through phrasing that makes clear the high stakes involved for the speaker. The phrase “I’ll be fine–” here is disrupted from its typical casual meaning by being part of a line that reckons with mortality. Having life and death in one line, then, parallels the speaker’s experience and brings us back to the title. Here, the tests are the practical medical procedures, but also the tests of living with a hard-earned clarity.

Woman with PCOS Describes Aversion to Tests – Minadora Macheret

Each cold chair haunts me,
staples past bodies & decisions
to the over-waxed floor.

Nurses prickly and sweet
stick needle after needle
into scarred flesh. There is no blood left,
no room to take me into,
where my hormones are not abnormal.

There never is an answer
just test the body, so the doctors know
it’s still living.

My breathing is slow,
as the stethoscope pierces my heart
this muscle beats irregularly
as long as it doesn’t stop, I’ll be fine—

*

Copies of Love Me, Anyway can be purchased from Porkbelly Press.