It’s almost indescribable to express my love for words. To me, writing has always been the purest essence of life through someone else’s thoughts. I have always likened writing to a landscape filled with one’s hurt, sentimentality, and thoughts.
I wanted to become a writer when I read William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. It was the beauty of Wordsworth’s language and his inclination to describe the pangs of life, in such a manner that is painstakingly beguiling, which compelled me to write. Here’s just a single fragment of the poem—
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
I discovered beauty in my interpretation of his thoughts. For me, Wordsworth emphasized actions can be the products of feelings, anything or nothing can be important, and innovation can extend only as far as the imagination. I also wanted to be a writer because paper was the only one who listened to what I had to say, in a sense.
In a 1998 essay called “The Nature of the Fun”, author David Foster Wallace writes about the pleasure of writing. “You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing to enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like.” I wanted my words to speak louder than my voice ever could. The process of writing is like a way of taking pictures of consciousness. Photography is the art of capturing a moment and in many ways poetry is like capturing a moment of thought or a feeling. As movies are sequential pictures that tell a story, books are like sequential thoughts that also tell a story. Writing has become something like a way of capturing life in my eyes.
My favorite pieces to write are poetry. I often write poetry that is quite confusing and hard to understand because I think that I am quite confusing and hard to understand. Poetry charms and captures the emotional link between language and the human body in its sounds and rhythms. It is language at its freest and liveliest. To step into a poem means to revolutionize yourself as poems prompt revolutions of being. In an interview with psychologytoday.com, Poet Jane Hirshfield was asked why she writes poems. She stated, “To write poetry is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, or music, that you didn’t know was in you, or in the world.” Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. Writing also invites one to revel in someone else’s experience and discover themselves.
Writing is immortal and will always outlast humanity. Writing is also art. Arranging words, metaphors and stories creates a vision that makes more splendid the eye, ear, tongue, and heart. I find it so beautiful these arrangement of words that speak so loudly and splendidly.