Shapeshifting

The story of my first poetry reading

I was late that Saturday, as I was every time. And it was raining, as it had every time. In the first year I lived in the city, it had rained only once, but there was a drought then. Now, any given day the sky is painted gray, and the streets are dampened or soaked. That Saturday happened to be the final session of a poetry workshop I had been taking — a four-class journey through the history of poetics in the Bay Area that ended with a reading, by us, modern Bay Area poets. My first time reading my poetry to a crowd of any sort.

I was wrought with anxiety for the week leading up to it: too afraid to look through my poems from the class to see which ones were good enough to share, while also unable to think about nearly anything else. Instead, I thought about every possible outfit I could wear. Even if I wasn’t able to properly revise like a poet or write incredible poetry, I could at least dress like a poet, or at least my mental image of what a poet was. Early in the week before, I’d figured it out, if nothing else: wide-fit slacks, a mock-neck sweater, and dressy-ish boots.

Despite my sartorial decision-making, my body continued to think that it was under threat of attack, like reading some words off my phone to a small crowd of people was life-or-death, like there was truly anything that could go wrong in a supportive community of writers and peers. I only invited some of my writer friends to come, too afraid that I’d have to subject people who didn’t care about poetry to something they wouldn’t enjoy, too afraid that I’d have to live up to an uncertain expectation of whatever a layman thought poetry should be. 

And then, I was standing, with sweaty hands, in front of a large painting in a small gallery in the Mission district, facing a few dozen rows of chairs mostly filled with people from my class, their loved ones, and a couple of my own friends. I gave some spiel about it being my first reading, I thanked the audience, and I began to read my poems. It felt like an instant passed and I was sitting down again, hearing a very kind applause and finally letting my shoulders drop and the tension ease. Despite my body’s fears, the experience hadn’t killed me.

I had volunteered to go second out of 11 readers, and I sat in the front row, in rapt attention as the other poets in the class went up one by one, sharing poems about myriad topics (love, loss, committing crime, etc.), tied to poems we’d read in class. And everyone was incredible, bringing humor and laughter and joy and beauty and rage into their work in such interesting ways that I hadn’t seen before, hadn’t expected.

Despite the fact that I knew I absolutely adored poetry, I hadn’t expected to enjoy the experience as much as I did. I figured that poetry readings were usually stiffer and more emotionally intense, but instead, nearly every poet wove humor into their pieces, making me laugh more than some stand-up comedy sets. Despite the fact that I’d been wanting to get more involved with poetry in general, I never thought that I’d be a type of person to read a poetry reading, to enjoy myself so much listening to my peers share their work.

---

For a little while, I’ve been trying to become more cultured and artistic, attempting to ape the aesthetics of someone cultured to see if it would somehow change the way I thought and my abilities. My feeds started to fill up with poems and clips from old foreign films, I started to learn the names of jazz musicians to play in the background, and I made friends with the type of people to have a favorite Romanian author. Slowly, I learned to love these poems, adore the works of Ingmar Bergman and Bill Evans, to read books that were outside of my typical purview. Yet, at times, these actions felt a bit like my mock-neck sweater outfit, like I might be hiding my true self in an aesthetic of something that I wasn’t.

As a part of this effort, a few weeks ago, I started to put a lot of pressure on myself to be more serious about writing. I wanted to force myself to write every day and read a certain amount and generally be more disciplined about my approach to the subject. My seriousness leaked into my work life, where I found myself getting more stressed than ever, attempting to be a perfectionist in my fast-moving team. After only a few days of this, I found it difficult to sleep, a ball of stress in my stomach.

One morning, I woke up and realized that I wasn’t having fun at work or in my writing, and that was a sign that this wasn’t the right direction for me. Maybe being serious and disciplined as a writer and putting in long hours at the word factory was the right way to live for some people, but this approach didn’t match who I was. 

When I shared my struggle with my writing group, Daniel hit me with a simple truism, “the trick that has worked for me is just not taking yourself seriously.” And, yeah, he was right. I could take the practice of writing regularly and well seriously without taking myself seriously. I started to lighten up, and everything got easier. I wrote an essay about how you chant a tweet to yourself, and it felt so much better than anything I tried to pressure myself towards writing.

But this past week, when I was mentally preparing for the poetry reading and mentally ripping through my closet, I wondered if the stress I was feeling was the same sort of dissonance — my body telling me that doing poetry readings wasn’t aligned with my authentic self. I had never been a person to perform in front of people, how could that change now? I’ve only ever shared my writing digitally with people, how could that change now?

And yet it did. I loved being in front of everyone to share the words I’d spent piecing together, I loved to hear my peers do the same and trace them back to the lineage of poets we both knew and loved. There was a younger version of me that would’ve hated all of this, but I realize that I’ve made myself change over time: to love poetry, to love old films, to love jazz, to love foreign literature, to love performing poetry even. It’s really all sweaters: there are some sweaters that you can grow into and some that you can’t, some that get softer with washes and some that don’t last. It takes a while to figure out which ones are which, but once you do, isn’t it so worth it?

---

We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Things are only getting worse. Calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donate to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buy e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families. My friend Mosab’s family has been taken hostage by Israeli forces; writing a letter to your representatives to demand their release could help.

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - feb 24 - a mix of Deftones and chill music to work to

• POEM - “Some Things I Said” by David Ferry - I said death lives in our words

---