Seeing the Beasts
by Poetry Editor TJ Prizio
Right now, I’m experiencing messy feelings. The kind that are unresolvable, that come after. New to this mess, I’ve learned the necessity of writing, where before, I was doing it to craft sentences that I thought “sounded cool.” (Hey, we’ve all been there.) In dealing with these after-feelings, writing doesn’t make them go away, but spending time with them helps.
Though part of me wants to repress these ‘bad’ feelings, at the end of the day, coming face-to-face with what you avoid is what I think concerns all writing—confrontation. In the poetry I read, I want a ‘wake-up’ moment that changes the speaker, so directly and pertinently to the shared reality of those spaces, that it changes me as a reader. One thing a good piece of writing can do, is help people who are resisting change, get comfortable with the idea that things change regardless.
So why write about the things you want to avoid? Some people have therapy. Some go to religion, drugs, self-help, mindful meditation. Others have music, nights out, etc. I have poetry. I write poetry, to know myself. I write to tiptoe into my shadow and offer apples to the mourning beasts, to acknowledge their existence. I have trouble crying in the literal sense (unless I’m listening to Sufjan Stevens) so I need to find another cathartic outlet, in language that makes sense to my particular circumstance.
Poetry helps us cross into the unknown of our depth, and return with a new element in our hands. Hopefully, if it’s done right, other people can look at what we take back, and see an amount of their humanity within it. What I love about this element is that, like any artwork, sense and logic (outside of the art’s own structure) are not essential factors. One can connect and understand a poem, without having a clue what it is that they connect with.
The feelings I’m going through relate to my realizing that not everything good is meant to last forever. And I hate that my mind won’t let the good memories, and the potential memories, go. Despite how much I want to write about other things, I can’t seem to escape writing about this sense of loss. It’s as if This Feeling is standing across the street, but I’m not wearing my contacts, so it’s just some gray aura shaking and gesturing. Or maybe it’s like I discovered that I do have that organ that everyone else seems to talk about, only now it’s mangled and needs to be removed.
Am I making sense? Though I do hate the idea of letting go, the thought of moving on, I’m fascinated by my feelings surrounding these. It’s a total entity—it’s hungry sometimes, it wants to sleep sometimes, then it wakes up again. But what I’ve noticed is that it’s most angry, and I feel at my lowest, when it’s ignored.
It is for sages and wizards, to travel where no one dares go and return with the words that will appease the roaring beasts within. As writers, it is crucial to our mental health that we give the gift of communication to our messy feelings. Words render form, make our monsters come into focus, and more importantly, make them seen. Like us, all our feelings really want is visibility. It’s a heavy burden, but one we can’t seem to shake, to dip into that moonlit pond by the cavern, and resurface with a living poem—the messy made heard and seen. I think that’s why I love electronic artist Tipper’s beautiful and haunting song “Virga” so much. It sounds like an apology made just in time, or the resolved peace of finally looking at pain as an old friend.
Say the abstract truth in weird images, and you’ve written a poem I love. Likewise, tell me about your hurt in a way as I can see it, and you save the both of us.
TJ Prizio is the Poetry Editor of Barnstorm Journal and an MFA Poetry student at the University of New Hampshire. Raised in Connecticut and living in Dover, NH, his work has appeared in CausewayLit, where it won the 2021 Winter Poetry Contest.