“I am” statements are some of the most powerful.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.1
In “I am,” there is something so solid. Immediate and simple: “I am.”
I love myself (He said I gotta get up, life is more than suicide)
I love myself (One day at a time, sun gon' shine)2
The container of subjective experience. The authority implied therein.
Am I not inside my life?
Is my life the many places I can be
alive in and not get nostalgic
about?3
I am, and I know that I am because I am I. If I wasn’t I, I couldn’t be.
I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.4
But “I” is a trick of language. “I” is the blanket of leaves concealing the trapdoor.
I think that space attracts poetry because on some level, poetry is an instrument of the enlargement of consciousness. Because it’s measured by your human breath and yet it’s language, which can come from anywhere. It doesn’t really come from inside me. I didn’t invent English, I didn’t invent this culture, but it’s being measured out by the rhythm in my body and that produces melody in these spaces that make no sense to me.5
There is no such thing as “if I were you.”
It can be startling to see someone's breath. Let alone the breathing of a crowd. You usually don't believe that people extend that far.6
As connected as we all are to each other, we are not interchangeable.
I can’t explain the sensation I have in moments like that, where you have this thing that you’ve very roughly conceived and then the world delivers pieces of it to you. And I can’t explain how it happens. It’s just like a numbers game. The more open you are and the more stuff you try—these people are out there.7
Things are subjective. Things are relative. “I” is not a thing.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.
Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.8
“I” may be an idea, or maybe I am an idea. Or maybe I am an “idea.”
Sunday is a day of echoes— hot, dry, and everywhere buzzings of bees and wasps, cries of birds and the distance of paced hammer blows— where do the echoes of Sunday come from? I who loathe Sunday because it’s hollow. I, who want the most primary thing because it’s the source of generation— I who am all of this, must by fate and tragic destiny only know and taste the echoes of me, because I cannot capture the me itself.9
What does “I” have to say about the universal? Are we all more “I” than we are “we”?
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.10
And there are languages and meanings. “I” is a pronoun, but I am not a pronoun.
I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that's that.11
When I am “you” or “they” or “she” or “he” or “one,” I am still “I.”
Who do you think you are? I am!12
So do I coexist with myself?
It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know!13
And what is “myself”?
There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the tale I’m telling; then, inevitably, I revise the story as I change. The long work of revising might itself be a source of continuity in our lives.14
I am trapped within language, aren’t you?
Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it. A bladeless knife. With no handle.15
And the world of things says “yes.”
And the world of people says “yes.”
And the world of animals says “yes.”
And the world of poetry says “yes.”
And the sameness of these worlds has no voice.
And the lack of voice says “yes.”
This has been an experiment in form. The italicized text is my own. The non-italicized text was taken from multiple sources, listed here with some additional comments:
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was published in 1963. She committed suicide that same year. Plath was the first poet I ever referred to as my favorite poet.
“i“ was the first single released ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s third album To Pimp A Butterfly. These lyrics do not appear on the album version of the song. Lamar’s fourth studio album, Damn, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018. To this day, many Kendrick fans feel that To Pimp A Butterfly was largely overlooked by critics and the public when it came out. Some even believe that TPAB was better suited for a Pulitzer than Damn was, due to its cohesive storytelling, strong “conscious rap” sensibilities, and impressive synthesis of many musical influences, including jazz and funk.
“La Vita Nuova“ is a poem from Eileen Myles’ 1982 collection Sappho’s Boat. The poem makes use of the typical New York School style of describing mundane experiences while questioning or commenting on the nature of life, love, god, humanity, etc. After the lines I quoted come these lines: “Is man alone in the Universe? / What about me? I’m / replacing a lightbulb / and thinking about you.” It almost seems that the general and the specific are one same thing, both happening at once, inseparable, channeled through the “I.”
“Bioluminescence” by Paul Tran was published in The New Yorker in June 2021. The poem’s central image is the light produced by creatures in the deep sea. I came across the poem In March 2022 just hours after a visit to the aquarium. This felt to me at the time like a beautiful instance of synchronicity.
This quote comes from a conversation between Emily Wood and Ariana Reines, published in The Creative Independent. I have probably read more Ariana Reines interviews than I have Ariana Reines poems. The way she speaks just speaks to me. “I” is trapped in language, which is separate from space. The poetic realm brings these and other dissonant things together. In other words, poetry is a harmonious event with no traceable impetus and no foreseeable end.
Jenny Holzer completed her “Living Series” in 1982. The text of “It can be startling to see someone’s breath…” has appeared on enamel signs, bronze signs, and engraved marble benches. It also appears in the current draft of my new manuscript as a section epigraph. So far, it has informed my writing quite a bit. I saw a Jenny Holzer piece in person for the first time earlier this year, a smallish, angular, inscribed bench nestled away in the outdoor garden of an art museum. I disregarded the “do not touch the artwork” sign for just long enough to briefly trace with one hand the cool contours of the marble’s edge.
In this part of a 2021 interview with Vanity Fair, documentarian John Wilson discusses a scene in his HBO show How To with John Wilson. I just watched the episode in question yesterday. The thesis of the episode is that John Wilson, the show’s narrator, is trying to learn the proper way to dispose of batteries. This leads him to meet up with a woman selling vintage batteries via Craigslist. When he meets the woman, she reveals that the batteries were a quirky piece of decor left behind by her ex-husband when he moved out. She also shows John a box containing her cat’s ashes and later tells him she has no intentions of ever getting rid of her wedding rings from her past marriage. The show’s charm is in the way seemingly ordinary encounters deepen into meditations on life. What makes us hold on to certain things? How and why should anyone ever part with something that once symbolized joy, belonging, and companionship? Why are we so afraid to find out who we’d be if we let go? I enjoyed watching both seasons of How To because, despite the fact that it is produced and somewhat scripted, it feels (and probably is) more real than anything I’ve ever seen on TV. And yet, relatability is filtered through the “I”: I relate to you, who I am not. It is this negation that creates the feeling of connection.
“I Don’t Know How Many Souls I Have,” translated by Richard Zenith and published in Fernando Pessoa & Co. — Selected Poems, is perhaps one of Fernando Pessoa’s best-known works. Pessoa (on whom I wrote my undergrad thesis) wrote under different heteronyms, each with a different perspective, backstory, and style. He was a solitary individual who had few friends and even fewer romantic prospects throughout his 47 years of life. It is even speculated that he died a virgin. Regardless, writing was the focus of his life. Pessoa approached the themes of solitude, beauty, nature, and self in his own work as well as that attributed to his heteronyms. His ever-elusive selfhood is scattered across the multitudes of poems, essays, and prose fragments that comprise his diverse body of work.
Água Viva, or The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector is a book without a story featuring a narrator without a self. In the introduction to the 2012 New Directions edition that I own, Benjamin Moser posits that the book “more properly belongs to the realm of dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real.” If you Google the book, you will see it described as a “meditation,” a “novel,” a “hybrid book,” and a “lyrical work” (isn’t it fascinating how we strive to define that which is truly unique?!). It is the most heavily annotated book on my shelf.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine is the reason I’m trying out this style. In the book, she weaves together text, photography, current and historical events, personal anecdotes, invented dialogues, poems, dreams, prescriptions, meditations, critiques— all given fuller context in the 21-page Notes section at the back. You know when you read something and you can tell that by having read it, you are inching closer to becoming the artist that you want to be? Yes and yes.
“Red Shift” by Ted Berrigan ends with one of my favorite Berrigan lines of all time: “The world's furious song flows through my costume.”
Here I go trying to find poetry in memes again. When professional bowling champion Pete Weber won the U. S. Open in February 2012, the excitement of victory turned what should have been a powerful expression of triumph into the unintelligible phrase “Who do you think you are? I am!” In an interview with Storm Bowling a few months after the win, Weber explained that he meant to address someone in the audience who he had heard rooting against him. He intended to say something more along the lines of “Who do you think you are? I’m the man of this tournament.” But there is something oddly electrifying about the chaotic simplicity of “I am!” When an excited crowd has just watched you claim victory, you don’t need to convey anything as precisely as “I am the winner.” All you need to say is “I am!” and the moment will live forever.
James Baldwin’s ideas on the role of the artist in society are ones I find myself returning to again and again. In the brief essay The Creative Process, from which this quote was sourced, he asserts that the artist should disturb the peaceful ignorance in which many humans live their lives. I am constantly asking myself questions. Why am I writing about this and not that? What lessons am I learning from the art I consume? Am I perpetuating any ignorance, particularly ignorance of self, through my work? Do I coexist with myself? Is there any other choice?
“Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?” is a recent article by Joshua Rothman published in The New Yorker. In the print edition, it was titled “Becoming You.”
In an essay for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, poet Kaveh Akbar asks and answers the question “What Can Ancient Spiritual Poetry Teach Us about Living?” He reaches the conclusion that “poetry opposes [the modern influx of meaningless language], asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of it entering us.” Spiritual poetry in particular creates a link to the divine by displaying genuine openness to and regard for the unknown. It is what the poets call negative capability, what believers call faith. Language cannot tell me what the “I” is, but it gives me an outlet to voice my questions and theories. Akbar’s bladeless knife with no handle acts here as an echo of Paul Tran’s “approaching at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.” It is satisfying to watch language chip away at itself in the world of poetry. We may even think of “I” as a series of similar negations. If I am drinking a cup of coffee, “I” am not the cup or the coffee or the drinking, thus “I” must be that which drinks. It’s far from a flawless definition, but by manipulating language, one can cause even what is not there (an answer, a self) to be there.