In reading her latest posted poem, an old Billy Joel lyric flashed through my brain from Scenes from an Italian Restaurant: “They’ll find a way to get by” which is what the poem suggest she will, too.
The self-doubt, the introspection, the sometimes near panic contained in the poems she’s posted over the last few months still clings to this poem as well – perhaps more so as she searched for identity, who she is, who she was and who she once thought she would be.
And somehow, this retrospective allows her to refocus, and to – as she puts it – get back into the game.
She seems to understand the need to be in the game, even when she is not always treated fairly, and often comes out on the losing side.
Not to be in it is not to exist.
And her whole life going back as far as she can remember is about survival – if not of the fittest then of the most cunning, and when need be, the most ruthless.
As she points out in the poem, this is not the first time she has gotten the “chance to balance,” what she would and would not do at herself, if indeed, she could determine who exactly self was.
She still doesn’t know who she meant that to be, although when she gets to the point of being that person, it’ll be all right, a kind of balance.
She says it is brand new while at the same time very old. She seems to see herself from outside herself, flying back into the game, not completely sure how it will all end up, but not caring either.
The poem is about rediscovering herself after having been diverted from a vision she had of herself at some more positive time in the past, after years of other people apparently trying to define her, her history full of other people who desire to shape her into someone they want rather than who she thinks she is, and in this mix, even she seems to have lost herself.
Again, we get a speaker examining herself in an internal monologue, trying to make sense of what has happened to her, and what she needs to get back on track.
She questions what she would do “as herself,” implying as in some of her other poems that she has listened too long to the ill-advice of others around her.
But in order to understand what she would do, she has to determine who she is or was or wanted/wants to be, even though as she puts it, “You still don’t know who you meant that to be.”
The subtext is that nobody has a right to define who you are except you. Yet other people have the ability to confuse you, make you doubt yourself, until you doubt who you are and what you ought to be.
She seems to be the audience this poem is written for, yet as with all her poems, she appears to want to provide a glimpse of her thinking and her mood for anyone astute enough to make sense of it all.
She is clearly telling the world that she is coming back, no longer caring about what other people think –since nobody appears to know who she really is in the first place.
After months of mopping and worrying, she has finally thrown her hands up saying, “what the fuck” and getting on with her life. To hell with what other people think.
She is clearly going to do what she needs to do, as she has always done, to survive.
All this comes at a time when the career she thought she would pursue as a writer evaporated before her eyes, and all the quality work she engaged in wasted.
She wound up in a job far below her skill set and for less significant than she deserves.
The poem is partly about figuring out what exactly she needs to do next.
The details of what has transpired in this less career remain a mystery, yet there is a sense that she has been disrespected to the point perhaps that she began to question her own worth.
This poem comes across as a document of liberation, casting away doubt, and forcing herself back onto her feet like a boxer who had been knocked down, but not knocked out.
There is at the start of the poem a mood of hope, a sense of finding momentum again after a moment of reflection. She has been here before. She knows what to do, and so must do it again.
There is a tone of true grit in all this, no longer playing the role of good soldier as she as in the past, yet still shouldering the boulder as her old self to push it back up the hill, even if the effort is pointless, even if -- as gods before her have discovered – the boulder rolls down the other side.
This is who she is.
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