Getting back in the game February 18, 2013
In reading her latest posted poem, an old Billy Joel lyric
flashed through my brain from Scenes from an Italian Restaurant: “They’ll find
a way to get by” which is what the poem suggest she will, too.
The self-doubt, the introspection, the sometimes near panic
contained in the poems she’s posted over the last few months still clings to
this poem as well – perhaps more so as she searched for identity, who she is,
who she was and who she once thought she would be.
And somehow, this retrospective allows her to refocus, and
to – as she puts it – get back into the game.
She seems to understand the need to be in the game, even
when she is not always treated fairly, and often comes out on the losing side.
Not to be in it is not to exist.
And her whole life going back as far as she can remember is
about survival – if not of the fittest then of the most cunning, and when need
be, the most ruthless.
As she points out in the poem, this is not the first time
she has gotten the “chance to balance,” what she would and would not do at
herself, if indeed, she could determine who exactly self was.
She still doesn’t know who she meant that to be, although
when she gets to the point of being that person, it’ll be all right, a kind of
balance.
She says it is brand new while at the same time very old.
She seems to see herself from outside herself, flying back into the game, not
completely sure how it will all end up, but not caring either.
The poem is about rediscovering herself after having been
diverted from a vision she had of herself at some more positive time in the
past, after years of other people apparently trying to define her, her history
full of other people who desire to shape her into someone they want rather than
who she thinks she is, and in this mix, even she seems to have lost herself.
Again, we get a speaker examining herself in an internal
monologue, trying to make sense of what has happened to her, and what she needs
to get back on track.
She questions what she would do “as herself,” implying as in
some of her other poems that she has listened too long to the ill-advice of
others around her.
But in order to understand what she would do, she has to
determine who she is or was or wanted/wants to be, even though as she puts it, “You
still don’t know who you meant that to be.”
The subtext is that nobody has a right to define who you are
except you. Yet other people have the ability to confuse you, make you doubt
yourself, until you doubt who you are and what you ought to be.
She seems to be the audience this poem is written for, yet
as with all her poems, she appears to want to provide a glimpse of her thinking
and her mood for anyone astute enough to make sense of it all.
She is clearly telling the world that she is coming back, no
longer caring about what other people think –since nobody appears to know who
she really is in the first place.
After months of mopping and worrying, she has finally thrown
her hands up saying, “what the fuck” and getting on with her life. To hell with
what other people think.
She is clearly going to do what she needs to do, as she has
always done, to survive.
All this comes at a time when the career she thought she
would pursue as a writer evaporated before her eyes, and all the quality work
she engaged in wasted.
She wound up in a job far below her skill set and for less
significant than she deserves.
The poem is partly about figuring out what exactly she needs
to do next.
The details of what has transpired in this less career
remain a mystery, yet there is a sense that she has been disrespected to the
point perhaps that she began to question her own worth.
This poem comes across as a document of liberation, casting
away doubt, and forcing herself back onto her feet like a boxer who had been
knocked down, but not knocked out.
There is at the start of the poem a mood of hope, a sense of
finding momentum again after a moment of reflection. She has been here before.
She knows what to do, and so must do it again.
There is a tone of true grit in all this, no longer playing
the role of good soldier as she as in the past, yet still shouldering the
boulder as her old self to push it back up the hill, even if the effort is
pointless, even if -- as gods before her have discovered – the boulder rolls
down the other side.
This is who she is.
Comments
Post a Comment