This is what I have so far for the introduction for my senior writing portfolio. Comments/suggestions?
--Introduction
The longing of a stranger is a universal thing. As Walt Whitman describes so beautifully in a number of his poems, there is something inherently mysterious about them. We have no conceptions of who these people are, other than their physical appearances or perhaps a few stolen spoken words. They aren’t muddled with previous notions of things they’ve done or said or things they will do or will say. Be it the love for a stranger across a room or coffee shop, the admiration of a stranger from across the street or subway, or a simple curiosity toward the way a stranger walks or talks or simply is, the theme resurges again and again in classical and modern poetry.
At a poetry reading I attended a few weeks ago, a woman told us of her daughter who was traveling in France. Her daughter told her over the phone how much she missed human physical contact. Wherever she went, she would see strangers she wanted to hug or kiss. There was something about certain people, even in another country, that made her feel so intimate.
I chose to break my manuscript into two parts, the “Real” and the “(Un)real,” because I believe, in the fascination of strangers, there is an element of realness to it (their appearance, the inflection of their voice if you are close enough, their facial expressions) and an element of fantasy (their families, their job, their sex life, what they prefer in their coffee, what god they believe in, who they’re going home to tonight). Similar to Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, I like to play around with the blurring of edges between reality and fantasy, good and evil, real and unreal. Even in stories of the most whimsical kind, there are still hints of truth in them. We wouldn’t read them unless we felt connected to them in one way or another.
Like dreams, I believe that my fictional poems arise directly from my psyche. They are a part of me, as are the stories in them, even if I did not realize it when writing them down. In the poems directly stemming from my life, I wish to convey a richer perception of life and the world around me. I don’t believe that what we see around us is all there is. Like the strangers we see on the street, there is more to them than what we see on the outside, so much more. And in this world, this universe, there is so much more.
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal,” she describes an event in her life when she meets an Arabic woman at an airport who becomes distraught after thinking that her flight has been canceled. Nye approaches the woman and speaks to her in Arabic, explaining to her that it has only been delayed, not canceled. Eventually, they become close—Nye calls friends to talk to the woman, the woman shares cookies from her bag with all of the women at the terminal, and soon the two are holding hands. Nye realizes that things like this still can happen, strangers can hold hands, people from all over the world can share cookies together, and “not everything is lost.”
