Author Information
Cheez Whiz
Muriel Palanca
AP Literature-Final Copy
Mrs. Geidel
May 7, 2007
CHEEZ WHIZ
Have you ever looked at some abstract piece of art and thought to yourself, “My five year old could do that. Heck, I could do that! In fact I can do better!” Often, the piece of “art” that is being so harshly scrutinized looks like someone tasted the rainbow with their feet and decided it was a dandy time to tap-dance on a canvas. In all honesty, one must wonder, what makes art “art”? What makes a blob on paper worth thousands of dollars? What is so special about a landscape gone wrong that makes it priceless? What makes this piece of art good? I somehow stumbled upon this same line of thinking when I read this poem in my literature book:
OO
BALL N
Yes, my friends. That is considered a poem. My first thought was, “What?!”. My second thought was, “If someone can honestly say that this is poetry, then there is a village somewhere that is missing its idiot”. It made me wonder why others were worthy or lucky enough to get published but not me. You see, I am an artist. My canvas is a piece of notebook paper. My paintbrush is a mechanical pencil that I mooched off of my best friend. My muse is often times the black armored knight of my dreams and my palette of colors comes from a dictionary, a thesaurus, and my somewhat firm grasp of sanity (or lack thereof). In other words, I am a poet. I am a severe critic of any poetry that I read, and almost always, I believe that I can write better than these people who dare to call themselves poets. I must confess that I am arrogant, but to my benefit, I would never insult someone’s creation to their face or without good reason. To tell you the truth, anything can be considered a poem, in the same way that any closet is a walk-in closet if you try hard enough, but there is a whole universe of difference between poetry and good poetry. I will admit that the word “good” is a somewhat feeble adjective, but in terms of poetry it can mean anything from “commendable” to “excellent” and as long as it is not “bad” or “okay”, I think you are on the right track. So, what gives me the right to judge between a group of words put together as a poor excuse for a poem and a poetic masterpiece that would get a pat on the back from Shakespeare himself? Well, my credentials are simply this: It takes one to know one. I know what you’re thinking, “How can this girl possibly fit her gigantic ego through the door frame?” and “She can talk the talk but can she walk the walk?” To the first question: I am pretty skinny so I somehow manage to fit my big head and my ego through the door frame, though at great difficulty after I have just eaten. To the second question: You bet I can! Give me a chance to prove it to you. In fact, give me a chance to prove it to yourself. It is not that difficult really. You (yes, YOU) can write a good poem. There is some natural talent required but I think that deep down, everyone is a poet though they don’t know it. It just takes a little practice and guidance. Just have an open mind and an open heart and you are already on your way.
First of all, the perception of poetry is so warped that an audience’s expectations are fairly low. The stereotype is a suicidal, angst ridden teen, an eccentric teacher, a hopeless romantic, or some English bloke who wears tights and frilly leggings that would make even grandma cry. These stereotypical people often produce trashy poems that must be weeded through in order to find a truly marvelous gem and I must say that it is worth it because I often find so few. There are a lot of people who give poetry a bad name therefore making poetry one of the lowest rungs on the literary chain which in turn, make it one of the least profitable markets. But people do not write poetry for the money, and you would be doing it for all the wrong reasons if you are. For poetry is not only a hobby or some passing fancy, but a lifestyle and a need. Poetry is like breathing to me when all of my feelings are suffocating me from the inside. It is my release and my passion. I think that is the most important. If you want to write truly good poetry, you must have a passion for it. One of my favorite quotes about passion comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping...waiting... And though unwanted... unbidden... it will stir... open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to us... guides us... Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank... Without passion, we'd be truly dead.”
Yes, I am a huge Buffy fanatic. I have a vampire fetish that is almost an obsession, but it is this obsession that gives me the bulk of my inspiration.
After passion, there must be a purpose, but before purpose, one must first be inspired. Now, the secret to inspiration is this: Inspiration will hit you when you are perceptive and looking for it. Basically, write down any and all epiphanies. If a line from a movie hits you in a certain way or there is a phrase that you cannot get out of your head, then write it down. As a movie buff, I go to the movies almost every weekend with my family and indulge in a motion picture for an hour or two. Though I am trying to keep a linear thought process while watching a movie, it is so easy for my mind to deviate when I hear something that puts my poetic juices on overdrive. I start thinking, “I like the way that sounds.” Or “That’s a great line to start/end a poem.” After letting the thought marinate for a few seconds, I dig through my purse for a pen and paper. Of course, life likes to laugh at me every once in a while, so all I usually have is a pen. My hand then becomes a substitute canvas for the time being. The sad thing is, I have often gotten out of the movie theatre only to realize that my priceless ideas for a possibly magnificent poem are not legible.
I have better luck at home though, where I have my three notebooks and an endless supply of scrap paper. Another thing that has benefited my artistic endeavors greatly has been my Ipod. Music is one of the greatest sources of my inspiration because I listen to it almost every waking hour that I am not in school. Lyrics easily get stuck in someone’s head, so it is almost impossible for me to not be inspired. I once wrote a poem taking a new perspective on “friends with benefits”. It was one of those late summer nights where I had decided to finish this poem which I had started weeks before. I was internet surfing and opened up Microsoft Word so that I could type instead. My Ipod was on shuffle mode, something that I usually do when I don’t intend to really listen to what is being played. While I was staring at the computer screen, the rock song “Use Me to Use You” by Trapt started playing. I continued to type, but stopped because the lead singer kept saying, “And I know that you use me to use you. And I know that you use me to use you. And I know that you use me to use you.” He kept saying it over and over again and I thought to myself that it would fit perfectly with my poem. When I was done, I titled my poem “Use Me”. The last two lines of my poems said,
“Since love is a lie, the sweetest deception, use me to use you, I keep asking for more.
This false sense of feeling we both understand because my heart is as empty as yours.”
This is one of the few ways that music has found it’s way into my writing. When using lyrics though, I try to change the wording while still keeping the same idea. If I borrow a line from somewhere, I still try to make it as much mine as possible.
There is a slight difference to being perceptive to ideas and actually looking for it. A great way to get short, meaningful phrases is to do “Scene Selection” on a DVD. I have all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD and whenever I sit myself on the couch ready to “Buffy my brains out” you can be sure that I have my handy dandy notebook with me. The first thing I do is look at the episode titles on the main menu. If there are any that look interesting, I write it down. Then, I examine Scene Selection and if anything sparks my interest, I write it down. While I watch the actual episode, I listen for lines, phrases, monologues or songs that catch my attention. If it does, guess what I do. I write it down. When I am watching my daily dose of television, I go through the same process.
All in all, inspiration can come at anytime. The key is to write it down, whether you are letting your mind wander in church, on the toilet, in school, at the movies, listening to music or sleeping. I have lied awake many nights because I could not stop getting ideas. My mind would not rest until I turned the light on and filtered my thoughts into a notebook. When I would try to fall to sleep, a hundred more ideas would crowd my head. It is a necessary evil, of course, but mostly, I revel in the thinking process.
After I have my idea, I think, “Who or what inspires me and why?” This “Why?” becomes my purpose. This purpose is like my fire which is ready to consume with whatever fuel I give it. Poetry starts with a feeling. The feelings that I generally start with are love, pain, anger, hate, lust, desperation and sadness. I start with these because they are the strongest human emotions and have the ability to push people to the edge of their sanity. Here is my warning: Good poetry cannot be forced. It is hard for me to write when I am happy, because I have never been truly happy anyways and I cannot write when I am apathetic because I have no fuel to burn. I can tell when I have forced a poem because I feel no satisfaction when I read it. The words may fit together nicely but there is nothing behind it, no deeper meaning. In my experience, my best poems came about when I absolutely surrendered to an emotion. I purposefully let myself feel hurt, and vulnerable. A good poet must have the ability to harness the magnitude of intense feelings that lie within the soul and put it on paper.
Before you even begin to put pen to paper, figure out who your audience is. When I say “audience”, I don’t necessarily mean the people who are going to read it. I am talking about the person you are writing it to. This scenario may not work one hundred percent of the time, but I personally think that a poem is better when you write it to someone. Sure, an idea will help you write a poem, but who or what is the catalyst of whatever you are feeling? Even if it is a “what”, there are almost always people involved. I usually end up writing to a guy; real or imaginary, vampire or Ben Burnly (lead singer of my favorite band, Breaking Benjamin), palpable or unreachable. Maybe I write to someone because of love. Love is the stem of almost all emotion, even hate. It may not make sense but to hate someone, you actually have to care enough to hate them. My apologies, I digress.
Like I said, good poetry cannot be forced. There have been times when I would have a dry spell that would last from weeks to months. It is terrible, to have ideas but not knowing how to start, or starting a poem but not know how to finish. What I do in the meantime is wait. Everything will fall into place eventually. There are many ideas that I know will make great poems, but it is just not the right time to touch them. I’ve always wanted to make a poem from the perspective of the Velveteen Rabbit or pink lemonade, but the words haven’t come to me yet.
When everything does fall into place, however, the writing process begins. I generally write prose poetry (has all of the essential elements of traditional poetry written in verse. It has rhythm, rhyme, repetition, assonance, consonance, and imagery) or in stanzas (a fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem). The element of rhyme is important to me because I believe it takes more effort but it makes the poem organized and a little more professional. It also helps the poem flow and makes it easier to read. Writing poetry must be approached in a methodical way. Every word must be precise and say exactly what you want to say. It must also “sound right”. How do you do this? Let me introduce you to your new best friend; the Thesaurus. I personally like the website www.dictionary.com because it has a dictionary and a thesaurus. I use the dictionary when I find a distinctive word that I would like to use but do not quite know the meaning. If you have trouble finding a rhyme, go to http://rhyme.poetry.com/ . I have both of these websites bookmarked because they are essential and, in my case, necessary sources which are quick and easy to use. Using this is the best way to avoid being “cheesy” and or using the same word more than once. There are thousands of words in the English language. Why use the word “beautiful” over and over again when you can use angelic, lovely or radiant? The perfect word can make even a good poem better.
Organize your writing even if it looks like organized chaos. I try to make my prose poetry look like free writing, almost as if I’m talking to someone. It can look easy and unplanned but still beautiful. This is a part of my prose poem, Ache:
“You are a junkie to that evanescent feeling of nirvana and would sell your soul just to have another taste. You are a slave to that fleeting moment of peace because nothing else is sweeter. You would do anything for it because all you want is more. He is everything that you were too afraid to want and never dared ask for. He is every good thing that you never deserved and are too selfish to resist. There is guilt of wanting something you can’t have, but the angel on your shoulder is giving in to temptation. Your quiet voice of reason beckons to you but the only thing you hear is you heartbeat screaming in your head. “
Another way to organize and put flow to your writing is to use anaphora (repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses, clauses, or sentences). I once wrote a prose poem called “A Love Letter”. I pretty much used anaphora on every paragraph while trying not to be terribly excessive:
“People say that if you love someone, you should let them go…but you know what? I just can’t do it. Tell me you don’t like me. Tell me you will never ever feel the same way for me as I feel for you. Tell me that I mean absolutely nothing to you and I never will. Tell me all of this before I’ve dug too deep to get out. Tell me before I’ve hit rock bottom. Tell me because I’m not strong enough to give up on you.”
In all fairness, I think that I did overdo it, but my general rule is not to repeat something more than 3-4 times in a row.
You can also change the rhythm by varying your sentences. For my prose poem, “This is Love”, I make the sentences short to give a feeling of speed and movement:
“Take it to the limit. Push until you crush your bones and don’t let anything stop you. Reach for the stars. Be fearless, unafraid. Live in the moment. No consequences. Never regret yesterday. Jump even if you see the bottom. When you crash, let it shatter you. Let your tears explode into a scream. Let the pain consume you. It is infinite for a moment and forever.”
If I wanted to say a lot of things at once without breaking the flow I would use compound sentences with “and”. This way, I could make it look like a train of thought while still being grammatically correct. Spelling and grammatical errors are distracting to the reader and show carelessness. Here is my use of “and” in “A Rock and a Hard Place”:
“Whenever I see you, my heart ignites and I’m breathless. In those few moments when it’s just you and me, I feel alive. It’s like the fear, excitement and dread of jumping out of a plane without knowing when I’ll hit the bottom. It’s that moment before that leap of faith when my heart seems to go faster and stops all at the same time. My stomach drops a mile down and my mind is so high and clear because there is only one choice. It’s you.”
Another way to vary the rhythm is to vary the rhyme. Most of my regular poems have rhymes that come in pairs, such as at the end of every two lines as demonstrated in my poem “Tomorrow”
“Everything that’s good in me is everything that’s you.
You’re the guy who’s in my heart, who I compare all others to.
Whenever I’m with someone else, your face is what goes through my head.
And though I try to think of them, deep down I wish it was you instead.”
When it comes to my prose poems, I usually do internal rhyme which is a rhyme created by words within two or more lines of a verse. I once did it by accident in “My Knight in Black Armor”, which gave it a back and forth sing-song quality that I find appealing:
“These moments I live for are too fast, too fleeting, and it tears me to pieces when I have to let go. I’m flirting with disaster and I’m wasting my breath, because with little white lies, I soon become colorblind. I’ll tell you the truth, for once I’ll be honest. I hate to admit what I willingly hide. You deserve better than the wreckage I am. I’m coming undone right before your eyes.”
There are many ways to write and organize a poem. Depending on what you choose to do, the way you organize it can mean the difference between a “blah” poem and a great poem.
While you are writing, keep the audience in mind, but don’t hold back. I was once writing to this “bad boy” that I had a crush on. While I was writing, I realized that I could not be as candid as I wanted to be because I knew that the guy would probably not take “mushy feelings” very well. When I was finished with my poem “Hemlock” I was happy that I finished it but I was not satisfied with the job that I had done. So here is my rule of thumb: I want you to write as if tomorrow and consequences do not matter. I want you to write as if you will die and this is the last thing that you will ever say. To tell you the truth, it is embarrassing and sometimes frightening to open myself up so much, but poetry is about honesty. If not for anything else, honesty is what will make your poem exceptional. It is sincerity that will make people connect with you in ways that cannot be explained.
When you have finished your poem, it is time for the dessert, the crème de la crème, my favorite part of finishing a poem. It is time to title it. You may have thought of a title while you were writing the actual poem or before you even began writing. This is the moment when you get to say, “It is complete. It is done. It is finished. I wrote something amazing for the world to see.” So what if you have no clue what to title your poem? Ask yourself this: What is the main idea of this poem? What am I trying to say? Is there a phrase in this poem that jumps out at me? Do I have a favorite line in this poem? Did I put the main idea in the very beginning/end and is it good? What is the idea/word/phrase/person that inspired me in the first place? Personally, the title is almost as important as the poem. It is the first thing that a reader sees and it is what stays in the reader’s mind while he or she is looking for the connection between the title and the actual poem. Maybe it is a pet peeve or a personal preference but if you cannot find a title, there is one thing that you should NEVER do. DO NOT NUMBER YOUR POETRY!!!...And some smarty pants in the crowd says, “Well, Shakespeare numbered his sonnets.” Do you know what I say to that? I DON’T CARE! For the sake of this argument I AM RIGHT! No arguments! No excuses! Numbers dehumanize poetry which is a human undertaking. If worse comes to worse, I would rather that you take some random word from the dictionary and stick it on. At least it will be funny to see the confused look on peoples faces when they ask, “What does “Cheez Whiz” have anything to do with love and loss?” And don’t you dare put “Untitled”. That is just cheating.
When you are done rereading, revising and tweaking your poem to the best that it can possibly be, I want you to show it to people. How else can you know if your poem is good or not? Isn’t that what I have been trying to get to all along? It is already good if you think it is. If you can honestly say that you did your absolute personal best and put everything you had into your creation, then it is good, but feedback from other people is just as important. Understand that not everyone will like it. Some may even scoff at you or mock you, but if, for just one moment, your poetry connects with someone on a level that is deeper than the heart, then it is good. Sometimes, the best response is that second of utter speechlessness before the breathless “Wow…That….was…GOOD!”
