When you find a thing that works for you, I think it’s easy to stick with that and do it over and over again. Especially if the thing that works is easy or familiar or un-intimidating for other people. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that—it makes sense!—but I’ve been thinking about what we can get out of doing things outside of our norm. I’ve been thinking about making it weird.
This is the story of one particularly weird poem.
There are a lot of poetic forms out there, but I don’t have any formal training or education in poetry outside of high school English (where admittedly I did have a great English teacher), so most of my poems follow a kind of generic form of 3-5 stanzas of 3-5 lines. They don’t rhyme except when they sort of do.1
I do other things that I think make my poems different and interesting—there is often a twist or a punchline of sorts, something that subverts what you thought was happening—but on a page they look like what a poem is “supposed to” look like. Most of my poems are also written to be performed, and so there are certain things I never got into because they don’t work well in a read-out-loud format. But a book is a different creature than a performance, and when I started working on Recurring Characters I knew I wanted to lean into that.
One of the very first things in the collection is “An Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors.” It is debatable whether or not this classifies as a poem, but if Franny Choi can do a scatterplot as poem then I think this counts (it was definitely written in the spirit of a poem)
Here is the guide:
It’s an unexpected format! It’s weird! It looks serious but sometimes it’s funny!
A small part of me is nervous that people will look at it quickly, assume it’s some kind of front matter, and flip past (particularly because it comes immediately after the table of contents). But I think the book is richer if you engage with it, and it sets up a meta layer that comes back at the end.
The piece is modeled after a guide of the same name in Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I created mine partly because Heartbreaking Work has a self-conscious, meta quality about it that I wanted to pull on. Most of Recurring Characters is centered in the “present” of 2014—in the thoughts and feelings of that moment. And as much as I was able to drop into that, there’s a part of my brain that was cognizant of the reality of 2024 and the fact that what felt real and true to me at twenty-one does not necessarily feel that way at thirty-one. The layer of commentary, of playing the character of The Author within the text, was a way to hold both things at once.
The other element of the guide is that I was looking for opportunities to invite non-poets into the work. When I was in the early stages of working on the book I had a conversation with a costume designer/dancer about the ways that choreographers can be hesitant to talk about their work and to say ‘what it means’—which turned into a conversation about the ways art is made inaccessible when the audience is blamed for not getting it.2 My poetry isn’t particularly opaque, on the whole, but I was curious about what it would mean to say, “here are some layers that you might not immediately see, or that might be worth thinking about more.”
Creating the guide asked me to articulate what’s at play in my work, and some of the things I wanted people to get out of it. I’m not usually thinking about symbolism explicitly when I’m writing a poem—I’m thinking about what word or image says the thing I want to say. For instance, there are two poems in the book where I talk about losing an earring. I didn’t go into those poems thinking, “here is what an earring means!” But I was thinking about loss, and the things we give away without realizing it, and the things we can’t get back. And an earring was a good mechanism for those thoughts, because I literally lost earrings and didn’t mean to and couldn’t get them back. The meaning finds a symbol, I guess.
On some level, poems are only as deep as you read them to be. You could read my poem, “Pearls before Swine” (one of the earring poems) and commit to the face value and think, “this person really wants their earring back” and you would not be wrong! The poem says to give the earring back, over and over again. But if you want to dig into it more, or you flip back to look at the guide, you might say, “oh the earring is innocence. This person lost an earnestness or a trust they didn’t know they would lose. They’re asking for something no one can give them.”3
Recurring Characters is slowly making its way into the world (the official release date is 9/14). I’m interested to hear what, if anything, people have to say about the guide and how it fits in with the many weird things happening in this book (we haven’t even talked about the text messages!).
If you’re interested in seeing the guide in context, you can request Recurring Characters at your local library or wherever books are sold.4
Body of Work is a project of uncommon practice studio, a multi-disciplinary studio dedicated to crafting a different relationship to making & doing. In a culture that prioritizes toxic productivity, it can be really f*cking difficult to prioritize sustainability, creativity, and process. uncommon practice studio supports creative people in building a new way of getting things done through workshops, tangible tools, and creative offerings (like this one!). If you’re interested in DIY tools, working together 1:1, or you’re just incredibly curious, visit uncommonpractice.studio to learn more.
There has to be a name for this but I don’t know it and for the purposes of this letter, it doesn’t matter.
But I am realizing, as I type this, that I should finally just get over my weird intimidation and do some poetic study. Maybe we’ll get into that another time
Not everything is for everyone but it seems to me like there’s something self-protective happening when an artist is trying to separate themselves from the legibility of their own work.
Analyzing your own work is an interesting intellectual exercise. If it won’t make you lose your mind, I think it’s worth doing.
Telling people about analysis of my own work feels a little strange.
You can buy it directly from me on the book website and get a little something extra too.
Oh Evan I LOVE this
💜✨️ I Love thys! Your matters of the heart can always be felt by others rather we belive it or not. I don't say weird, I say YOU 🫰🏾😎.