NaPoWriMo Day 1: Self-Portrait

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Happy NaPoWriMo! I’m so excited to write a poem with you for the next month.

Feel free to draw inspiration from this newsletter in whatever way you like, but I recommend doing the freewrite first. In my opinion, it’s best to get your thoughts on the page without too much influence. Then, we’ll read a poem together, find inspiration from it, and I’ll have a longer prompt for you to work on after that.

Of course, do things that feel natural to your own poetry process. If the prompts and poems send you in an unexpected direction, follow it—your instincts are what counts.

Onto the poetry!

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper” by Ric …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Conjure up a mental image of yourself.

What do you see? Are you sitting, standing, or moving your body? How so?

What’s in the background? The foreground? Are you holding anything? What are you wearing?

What age are you in this image?

Finally, what does this image want more than anything else?

Freewrite a self-portrait from these questions. Conjure up the image for the reader. Feel free to delve into interiority: the wants, desires, and feelings of this image—but be visually descriptive, too.

Write for 8-10 minutes, or at a point where you reach a natural conclusion in the writing.

Poem: “Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper” by Richard Siken

Retrieved from his poetry collection War of the Foxes.

Close the blinds and kill the birds, I surrender
my desire for a logical culmination. I surrender my
desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive.
Take it or leave it, and for the most part you take it.
Not just the idea of it but the ramifications of it.
People love to hate themselves, avoiding the
necessary recalibrations. Shame comes from vanity.
Shame means you’re guilty, like the rest of us,
but you think you’re better than we are. Maybe you
are. What would a better me paint? There is no
new me, there is no old me, there’s just me, the same
me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your
will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind,
you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You
want to solve something? Get out of your own way.
What’s the difference between me and the world?
Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know
what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to
being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening?
Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard
to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely
and slept through all my appointments. I clawed
my way into the light but the light is just as scary.
I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.
Admirable? Not really. I hate my friends. And when
I hate my friends I’ve failed myself, failed to share
my compassion. I shine a light on them of my own
making: septic, ugly, the wrong yellow. I mean, maybe
it’s better if my opponent wins.

Great poems are often propelled by some kind of tension, and in this poem, there's a tension between the speaker's self and the speaker's desire to create a better self, alternating between intellectualizing his feelings and feeling them at their full intensity. Often, the poem feels like a conversation with oneself, particularly when the speakers raises questions and then immediately answers them (a rhetorical technique called hypophora).

I’m also drawn to this poem’s intense vulnerability. Given the opportunity to paint himself in a better light, the speaker of this poem refuses—we are left with the blurriness of life, with septic yellow, red wallpaper, with vanity and shame.

The central tension is more than just desire versus reality, more than the desire and inability to impose his will on the world: the central tension is that the speaker is rejecting his selfhood in a poem about himself. That opponent he names at the end is very likely his self—maybe his inner saboteur, his inability to improve himself, his self-hatred, whatever, it’s still the awful fact of himself.

It’s also interesting how the speaker defines himself by what he’s not. This is my favorite movement of the poem:

What’s the difference between me and the world?
Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know
what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to
being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening?
Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard
to make it love.

I'll start by noting that "compartmentalization" is a hideous word. Ungainly and unlyrical, it interrupts the flow of this poem like a boulder interrupts a river. It's not a word to use casually, and yet it calls attention to what's happening in this poem, which is a sort of compartmentalization of the speaker's competing desires and facets, juxtaposed against the world's messy incoherency—a world that doesn't know what to do with the speaker's love. It's worth noting here that Siken himself is a gay man, and that's certainly part of the world's fumbled love, but I think it's more than that: I think most readers can relate to their love not being "useful" in some way to the world. This includes misplaced love, misguided love, love for friends or family or society, or even a love-that-isn't-love—the latter of which the speaker hopes he isn't secretly committing.

While the above is my favorite movement, I'd argue that this line is the poem's impetus:

I clawed
my way into the light but the light is just as scary.
I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.

In my reading, there's a double meaning here. There's the dichotomy of light and dark, or life and depression—the speaker has peeled back the layers of vanity and love and desire to reveal this stark naked truth. To him, being alive is just as scary as being depressed, but requires far more work to maintain. The honesty is unsettling and unflinching. But remember, also, that this poem is a self-portrait. I picture that awful light is hitting him in this poem, the light of being alive. Despite the horrible work of life, the speaker is still choosing it, even though depression's siren song echoes in the distance of this poem, even though sadness would be so much easier.

I'll draw your attention, lastly, to the pronouns of this poem. It always interests me when a self-portrait poem—a poem rooted in the "I"—decides to use "you". The "I" and the "you" are the same subject here, but sometimes the speaker is talking about himself, and sometimes to himself. Not to mention the lines about other people—the speaker is still talking about himself, but even more distantly. Why?

I notice that, the more distant the pronoun, the more the speaker is intellectualizing. He speaks to himself in the second person when he's trying to explain the logic of human nature. These things do often feel easier analyzed from a distance, but I think there's also a fragmenting of the self happening here—a fragment speaking to another fragment, the poem a kaleidoscope of selves bundled into a body, much like all of us are.

Your self-portrait poem doesn’t have to be this stark or bleak, but I encourage you to strive for this level of honesty.

Prompt

Today’s prompt is to write a self-portrait poem. Interpret that prompt however you like, but here are a few suggestions if you don’t know where to start:

1. Start with a title, and write from there. For example:

   1. Self-Portrait as _______

   2. Self-Portrait with _______

   3. Self-Portrait in _______

2. Write a self-portrait from a particular time in your life. For example:

   1. Self-Portrait at Sixteen

   2. Self-Portrait Before I Knew ______

3. Write a persona poem that is also a self-portrait. For example:

   1. Self-Portrait as Marilyn Monroe

4. I Am

   1. Write a poem written in a series of “I Am” anaphoras. An example of this is “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday

Above all, enjoy the process, give in to experimentation, and open yourself up to surprise. Happy writing!