Revisiting old writing
I've decided to move my entire poetry collection from a single giant Google Doc page to a more structured, tag-oriented program called Zim. The migration is painful, not only physically by needing to copy paste everything from one document to the other, but also emotionally because I catch words here and there that cause my body to react to the nostalgia of what I just read.
I've written a lot of poetry. Basically since I started journaling when I was 19 until now and probably until I'm dead. I started writing when I had no sense of poetic voice. In high school I thought it was an interesting format, but I didn't get it. I liked lyrics and how they acted as an instrument within the context of music. But reading poetry alone was completely alien to me. My first poem, written on August 1, 2020, is now in retrospect, a bizarre event. I remember writing the poem, probably because it was my first, but I have no idea what inclined me to write it.
For me now, writing a poem is such a simple thing because now can I recognize my ability in communicating emotionally in that medium. The first one I wrote feels like an attempt to speak a new language without ever having studied it. I can hit the beats, make the sounds that other people are making and maybe, to other people who also don't know, it seems like I am doing the right thing.
I'm fortunate I've always had an inclination to archive anything I make to preserve it, because my early writing is such a fascinating look into how my approach, voice and content itself changes over time.
If you have access to old writing, drawings, artwork or anything that you have produced in your life, go back and look at it now. I guarantee that no matter the content of it, there will be a deep sense of nostalgia for that period of time. This is why I archive everything. Every once in a while, I go blind to what I am doing right now, in the present. Going to the past, through art, is a deep vessel into which you can relive moments that had been lost in the noise of everything.
Occasionally I'll read an old poem of mine and remember that I had scribbled it on a piece of cardboard and then lost it somewhere. If I had never bothered to quickly archive it before it was gone, that poem would have ceased to exist. The words might yet still exist on that piece of cardboard, somewhere, but the memory of it would be so buried under years of life that no excavation could bring it out so quickly as a title and some words in a document could.
When a memory like this pops up it makes for such a bizarre sensation all throughout the body. There is a confused freezing through my spine that arrests the moment and I feel a bittersweet sadness reading these words again. Not because of the content of the writing, but memory that arises out of it.
The poem that I have paused my migration on, number 242, sucks. But I still have it because of that. Reading it, I remember where I was on that day, June 14, 2023. I remember how I went to the gas station before work in the morning and when I filled up my car I had paid $66.66. I thought it was funny so I took a photo of this and sent it to my friends. I was on the last page of the notebook I had at the time and eager to start the next, so I scrawled out some words quickly. I remember that I named it Splinter-Cross because I listened to Michael DeMaio's Half Cross that week and the word cross had some level of significance in that moment. I remember even after writing it I wasn't exactly satisfied and probably said something like "oh well, onto the next booklet" and did so accordingly.
Not remembering the origin of a piece of writing is the exception to this. More or less, I can recall the circumstances behind a piece of writing. The content of the poem itself is secondary to the nostalgia. At best, it serves as an abstract gesture to the event of my life at that time. No matter how impersonal a piece of writing is, it was done by a person, and that person will show through. Even when so much time has passed, I can certainly recognize my voice in writing from long time ago. There is personality in word choice.
I like to read old writing because it feels like such a vague history of myself that only arises when the memory is unearthed.
-bzg