Poetry, identity, and the construction of home

So after the woe-is-me post of yesterday, I feel compelled to write on that is a little more upbeat! I'm striving for balance in all things, even my blogging, haha.

When I was in high school, I felt genuine disdain for poetry and its adherents, mostly because they tended to be the same people who thought that Romeo was the BOMB and so romantic, whereas I felt he was really immature and stupid. I did like Emily Dickinson and her brevity that still conveyed deep passion. Everything else, well, I could care less about sonnets.

So when I got to college and switched into the English major, I was not switching for the poetry. But when I got my Introduction to Poetry anthology for English 108 (a class of terrifying reputation), I discovered a poem called "Learning to Love America" by Shirley Giok-lin Lim. I was hooked. It was beautiful. I felt it, this struggle with learning to love a country. "it is late and too late to change my mind" read one line, and I knew it, even though I felt like I had not really had a choice in the choice my mind had made. This poem encapsulated a journey of acceptance that I knew I had to make, and contained both resignation and hope. Unfortunately, we never covered Lim in class, which I think is a shame, but discovering her certainly changed my perspective. I even wrote a response poem that I'm very fond of and revisit every so often to tweak. Sadly, the earlier iterations were lost in the Great Laptop Failures of 2010, but I have the most recent version and will keep on tweaking to reflect my continuing journey.

Probably the line that stuck with me the most deeply from "Learning to Love America" was "countries are in our blood and we bleed them;" yes, I thought. Sometimes more than one county mingles there. And our blood, it is inside, hidden, sustaining us even when no one else can see. When Thailand's political situation got so volatile, this was the line that was my personal mental refrain. That particular line also helped me shape a paper I wrote regarding a particular protest in which Thailand's Red Shirts collected their own blood and threw it at various government buildings. (Which I'm thinking/hoping/planning will become the central focus of my thesis also.) I bought Lim's anthology What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say on the justification that I needed the "real" citation of the poem for that particular paper.

I just got around to reading the rest of the poems. I was hooked from the first, titular poem, with the lines, "they never told about leaving, / the burning tarmac and giant wheels." It was a lovely anthology, with airplane poems! About flying between, always between, places that hold your heart. Belonging and not belonging. Deciding to love in spite of displacement. I also loved the final poem, "Self-portrait." Sometimes I think we come across what we need, when we need it, and I needed this poem yesterday. Here are the final lines:

I have more desires than
there are wigs in the world:
to be what I am not.
Also to be myself. To speak
many languages, each
as useful as this one
I wipe my tears with.
I want to be good and better
than I am. I want to sway
like the swaying palms
and hold heavy books in my hands.

(Shirley Giok-lin Lim, "Self-portrait." Found in What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, pg. 82, published 1998)

Beautiful. A new refrain. I'm putting her other anthologies and memoirs on my motivational summer reading list.