Travelogues: Family to Poetry

After Atlanta, we spent the weekend in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and then I went back to D.C. my trip then continued to the mountains of Montana, and then to Seattle, Washington. Between the time I was in D.C. for a touchdown at my homebase, I briefly saw Ocean Vuong at a book event for his latest poetry collection. I say this casually as if I just waltz around with casually cool things happening to me but I had been looking forward to this for a long time. I had no one in my life as interested in poetry and art as me, but it didn’t matter, because I was going to see one of my favorite poets alive read and discuss his work! I recorded the entire thing, because listening to Ocean reminds me who I am. I am a poet. And for some reason I’m always trying to hide that fact, or make it adjacent to being a writer when really truthfully, its the way I most naturally express myself and that writing is shaping who I am, and so is reading, and that my mind is constantly craving ideas to be explored.

I went alone, but I was surrounded by people who took the time to listen to poetry. A room sold-out, for poetry. It restored my faith in humanity. I write this as I miss going to literary anglophone events. Living in Geneva means I need to go to London, Boston or DC to see authors and writers I love. Being a part of a literary community who share the same love and value it with the same sacred importance that I do is so vital. I thought, erroneously, that being a part of an English department at an international high school would provide me with a similar literary community, but alas, I was mistaken. I’ve traveled to see writers in the US but can’t seem to afford to get to London just yet. I guess I’ll wait til one day I do, or learn French properly and become a part of the french literary community. Those are the options when you’re an anglophone writer stuck in a non-anglophone area. Maybe one day we’ll move, but for now this is home. I am ever so thankful for the internet for connecting me with my anglophone writing community online, through Youtube, Substack, Twitter, and Instagram. There are people out there are share their creative process and encourage creativity, and I feel blessed I live in an age where I have easy access to the world I crave so badly in my lived reality.

*Insert something pithy about how technology is a double edged sword*

The Importance of Being Moved

“We don’t know what we know until we can express it.”

– Mortimer Adler

When prompted to respond to this article, “Why So Many MIT Students Are Writing Poetry” by Joshua Bennett, it immediately brought to mind my own university days, where I had a friend who was a Math and English double-major. I was an English and Creative Writing double-major, and we spent time doing what these MIT students are doing. We talked, read, and shared our compositions. We discussed zeitgeists past and present, and how they shape poems, how poems shape lives, and how these particular poems influenced our thoughts and feelings. We both believed that the arts and sciences were in pursuit of the same underlying attempt: understanding what it means to be human. He found poetry in maths and set theory in poetry. One can be moved by logarithmic functions as much as Shelley.  

What Bennett phrases as the “purpose and power of human expression” is the driving force behind all my studies. It is why I read, write, and teach. I write to make room for the small, seemingly inconsequential observations of my daily life. I read to remind myself that those things matter. The classroom is, for me, a place for “making room for the miraculous,” within the quotidian, and is also a place to “practice being human”, as Bennett writes. I love seeing school as a practice for being human, which is to say, a practice of understanding yourself, continually. 

But I don’t claim to have all the answers. I write to surprise myself. I teach, too, to surprise myself. In fact, teaching poetry can prompt more questions. 

What is surprise? What does it mean to be moved by a poem? 

In my class, I aim to make space to simply be moved by a poem. Many poets have described these sensations that poetry can bring forth; for instance, Emily Dickinson described it as feeling “physically as if the top of (her) head were taken off.” However you describe it, or fail to describe it, there is an undeniable feeling of being moved– and it’s not a superficial one. 

Bennett argues that a poem “does the opposite function of AI– it lives and dies on its ability to surprise.” In any form of creative writing, I tell my students what my mentors told me: ‘Write toward surprise.’ Writing toward surprise allows us to be open with ourselves, to be unpredictable and unknowable to ourselves. 

If I can’t even learn to be me, then neither can AI. Bennett is “led to wonder whether the hunger for connection, understanding, and astonishment that seems to characterize much of the public interest in AI from the same need that poetry fulfills.” Through writing in class, I want my students to allow themselves to connect and understand, and practice making connections within themselves and with others. What else is being alive about? 

“Poetry has always been a technology of memory and human connection,” Bennet asserts. The sublime (or that sensation we feel when a good poem moves us), according to the Greek philosopher Longinus, fills us “with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.” This is not a frivolous pride that he suggests. In fact, poetry is more critical than it may seem.

The poet and author Audre Lorde, in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, posits that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into an idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give a name to the nameless, so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” 

Allow yourself to be moved. Allow yourself to give language to what already lies inside. And who knows– maybe your words will move someone else. 

  • Uma Jagwani 

Travelogue: Subject Yourself to Inspection

You always want to be smart when packing for a trip. That is, unless you think you are being smart but are actually being dumb. Let me explain: I bought sunscreen in advance of my sister and I’s beach trip, thinking it was good to be thinking ahead. But somehow it slipped my mind about the carry on liquid limit– a rule I had routinely taken into consideration for every other product I had brought. I bought sunscreen in advance only for it to be swiped by the TSA.

They said “Oh if you want to keep it, you can go back up and check your bag instead.” I replied,

“I’d rather buy more sunscreen.” They said, “Right.”
“I hope it doesn’t get wasted,” I added. They responded, “It has to.” And I replied “SAD!” while walking away, swinging my backpack around and peering for any signs of my gate.

I am very familiar with airplanes, but perhaps more familiar with airports. Been going on them since as long as I can remember. Sometimes the time in the airport seems longer than the time in the plane, even if that wasn’t the case. Though, things that used to frustrate me at the airport have morphed into a dull ache as I have trudged through countless security lines over the years. Before I used to rush much more, my hands scrambling to grab all my belongings from the conveyor belt, and quickly clamoring to put my shoes on, laptop in, etc., But now I take my sweet time. If someone needs to go ahead, they can go around. I am not letting this motherfucking security line fuck with my zen.

This time, on my flight to Atlanta from D.C., after I had walked through this machine that scans my body for things, I still got a pat down because apparently there was something in my stomach abdomen area that the machine detected. However, it was just the empty pockets of my jacket. They said empty your pockets but they been empty. I find these things inane. And violating.

Like you, I subject my body to inspection for brief moments in airports.

Being asked to raise your arms for the machine or remove your brand new sunscreen produces a feeling of deadness. Submitting to absolute authority gives the sense your agency (even briefly) has been rescinded. That while you are in this inferno of before flying to the heavens, one must pay a price. (Not the actual price you spent for your ticket. The price is a piece of your freedom.) All in the name of National Security.

Sometimes I think about how this because some insane motherfuckers crashed a plane into some buildings and killed a bunch of people. motherfuckers who have nothing to do with me but maybe they do have something to do with everyone because everyone goes through this dumb security line and the only way you can bring anything over 100ml is by paying $30 to check your bag for a flight you already paid quite a sum for!

It is of the nature of an airport to degrade the human experience to bodies in motion. From the security checkpoint, one is suspended in a limbo of a dull kind. People watching tends to be the most exciting thing you can do. Sometimes if I’m really into the book or TV series I’m into I’ll do that, but people watching can be all too fascinating. Couples, old and young, lonely travelers, work travelers with laptops out, new and experienced travelers. I think of how each one packed their bags: some carefully, some more sloppily, some with organizers, some without, some with carry on backpacks, some with shoulder bags. It reminds you that despite brief moments of suffocation the security may feel like, it really is a Choose Your Own Adventure game here on Earth. Everything feels more and more like a game as I grow older. I digress.

Once you exit security, you have detached yourself from the city you are now one with The Travelers. The airport doesn’t care who you are or where you came from. Fellow Travelers strike up conversations between one another, asking about the nature of their own windings paths. Of course, many travelers like myself tend to keep to themselves, putting on earphones and ignoring everyone else as much as they can. Or in my case, seeming to ignore everyone but actually watching them like a hawk.

So I boarded the plane, noticing that it was an older plane: the seats looked worn in, skid marks on the overhead compartments, the compartments themselves looking like the older, less ergonomic design push down instead of push up style, and the seats have this old blue leather that feels like a million butts had probably sat on it.

I did what I usually did: turned on my noise cancelling earphones and just sat there. Maybe I would end up talking to my seatmate. Though, this had proved itself to be an unpredictable in good ways and peculiar ways that interested me. I met a woman on a plane once and she and I had a wonderful spiritual connection and stayed in touch even afterwards.

Alternatively, I’ve had this painfully awkward seatmate who wouldn’t stop talking to me even though I had made polite gestures I would like to be left alone. It was a flight to the Philippines, and it was this white man who was going to meet his long distance girlfriend he met on Amazon Customer Service.

He kept asking me things like Did I live in the Philippines?

I used to live there in a past life.

Oh really? You believe in reincarnation?

No I meant when I was 14 to 18 but yes, I do believe in reincarnation.

***

Anyway, we landed safely in Atlanta and I took the metro to reach my sister’s apartment. To be continued.