Introduction / Looking back

Of the examples of my work I’d like to share, the first is the poem I linked to in my About Me section, “He Photographs the Fashionable.” I wrote the poem after seeing a documentary about the photographer Bill Cunningham (right). Soon after his death, I revised the poem. After showing it to some friends, my friend Charles said he’d like to place it on his website, punklawyer.com. And there it is. For the sake of convenience, I’ve opted to reproduce the poem just to the right of this text.

About Learning Goals in Past writing and Practice

This poem exhibits a number of Learning Goals. Rhetorical understanding of both poetry and narrative abound, and how I’ve deployed these conventions demonstrates fluency in flexible, open languaging in composition. “He Photographs the Fashionable” is a composite of choices, and a poet is like any other person because everyone must make choices. Not making choices, usually for lack of a plan, never goes well as some of us know. Sound choices in writing, like the rest of life, tend to produce sound results. I hope that that is the case here.

Originally this poem was one long column of text. I decided in early drafts that this interfered with readability and soon settled on three line stanzas, probably thanks to the influence of Wallace Stevens. This structural change helped to bring out the narrative and yielded a sense of spaciousness not present before. That feeling of space and openness paralleled how I wanted the poem to feel because of the impressions that stayed with me after watching the documentary and after imagining the daily life of Mr. Cunningham. I felt that he was both serious and light, an intellectual and a man who only got around on bicycle. Within the poem, I address the subject of the poem, speak about my own feelings and thoughts, and engage the reader by means of the second person singular pronouns and a rhetorical question. The shifts in address and pronouns lend fullness to the poem. There’s no single-minded writer set on himself here. Rather, there’s inclusion.

Word choice also figured large in my decision making. While I can’t claim that all the words were deliberate and conscious choices at first, after reflecting on draft after draft, the diction as it’s settled on the page feels right over two years after the final draft. In the first line, the phrase “baby blue” appears. I felt that this brought across a youthfulness and even childishness. That choice is contrasted with the detail that his smock “yields just at the waist,” which implies concision in dress, and by extension, concision in the choices made by the man wearing the article of clothing.When the poem continues into its second stanza, there’s a shift to the first person singular. This is a poem that folds and unfolds. The contraction into my viewpoint as I reflect on Mr. Cunningham’s ease of being heightens the expression of his gentleness and lightness through contrast.

Other detailing in the poem designed to create a picture of the man complement and include the choices in diction discussed above. The resultant picture, I hope, makes for a better narrative. I mention Mr. Cunningham’s smock, the man who looks like Mr. Peanut, and the anecdote about Mr. Cunningham’s sexuality to add nuance because I felt he was a nuanced person in his decisions, both in his art and his way of living. These details about Mr. Cunningham run parallel to the details I disclose about myself at the end of the poem. In the penultimate and antepenultimate stanzas, I describe an outfit that would be appropriate to a business setting, or perhaps daily wear in a larger city. Following that description, I deflate the seriousness and severity of the described style of dress with a sketch of a discussion about women’s hats and fall collections. This is the counterpoint, the balance I push toward in my life. One could say that I’m working toward making habits of mind into habits of life.

Habits of Mind

Given the poem and what I’ve written about it, I feel like a reader will understand that I’m comfortable with the eight habits of mind. And that would be an accurate assessment, though I’d add that these eight habits of mind aren’t fixed things, and that they aren’t fixed in how they relate to one another in my writing or how much weight one habit of mind might have at one moment compared to another moment. My curiosity, openness and engagement relate far more to ideas and things than they do people. This is true in my writing and how I live: it’s how my experience, values, and personality align. Like gaining flexibility through yoga practice, flexibility with people takes plenty of... well, practice. And yet bringing more curiosity, openness, and engagement to my everyday interactions would help my emotional development catch up to my development as a writer. The two developments might even propel one another and enhance the meaningfulness of my life as a whole.

Looking Forward

I’ve already overshot the 1000 word mark, so I’ll do my best to be brief here. My prior composing, as seen above, shows many sides to myself and how I write. Those sides, fragments of who I am and who I was, and the writing that is the vessel for those fragments will go unnoticed if I don’t submit more of my work for publication. I intend to submit more poems for publication this year to avoid that outcome while moving toward more publications and the larger profile that that brings. How I view myself as a writer and person is that I am becoming. If I venture into more engagements more often I feel that more artful and graceful becoming may be the result. So I hope.