Puzzle Pieces was originally crafted by Taylor Tedford as an introduction to her poetry portfolio as part of an Advanced Poetry class taken at High Point University throughout the Spring of 2017.
Puzzle Pieces
By: Taylor Tedford
I wonder if anyone at all thinks the same way I do. If lines appear to all poets as puzzle pieces, without a picture and with no guarantee they’ll fit together. They come to me unpredictably. I could be strolling or showering when fragments drift through my conscious. I record them in the margins of notebooks and store them in my phone’s notepad. I tuck them away, to return to another time.
You can trace images, lines, entire poems, back to these hasty observations.
This is the way my mind moves, like water, swift, catching branches and skimming pebbles. It is rapid like the ocean’s current when it's angry. Twisting and churning white crests meeting one another. Sometimes meandering like a shallow stream. Getting caught along the edge by a collection of branches or garbage, but eventually returning to the stream's flow. Constantly distracted.
This is the way I write, if that makes any sense at all. As if a bunch of pieces are crashing together in my mind and they need to meander through my fingertips to paper. The only way I know what I think is when I attempt to write it down. In my mind there are a million senses signaling my attention at the same time, but in writing I often find myself ruminating on a single moment.
Each of these moments results in it’s own puzzle pieces. They act as the embodiment of my experiences and thoughts. In compilation I am forced to question; how could they piece together? Which pieces should be cut? Or stored for another puzzle? And so it begins but it never ends.
That's what I've discovered about writing and about poetry in particular. I never feel as if anything is completely done. Or if I proclaim it to be, there are a thousand other versions of what it could be or become.
But what is portrayed is within my divine control. This is what I like about writing, the privilege of secrecy. I can delete words and they disappear forever. I can write them, store them, show no one, and they are my own. Although you have no choice in what truths your writing will reveal, you control which ones you want to expose. All of your vulnerabilities and your secrets are examined. Moments I hide from encompass my focus, allowing me to heal between uncovered lines.
For me, this process encompasses making the intangible tactile. Each of my poems approaches this validity differently, although there are threads amongst them. Often this tactility comes through metaphor and symbolism, by creating unusual connections to the way we feel. I tend to seek validity for emotions by making connections with science, the body, natural disasters (earthquakes, tornadoes); things that are uncontrollable. If our emotions can be related to processes that are uncontrollable, can we hypothesize our emotions are beyond control? This is the question my writing is struggling with throughout this portfolio.
In order to emphasize these connections I sought to emulate writing which easily shifted between metaphors. This led to a focus on enjambment and how it creates possibilities for interpretation. In her poem, Da Capo, Jane Hirshfield compares a “used-up heart” to a pebble, “Soon there is nothing left. / Soon the last ripple exhausts itself / in the weeds.” By choosing to place the line break after “itself” Hirshfield disconnects the action from the subject, allowing her reader to interpret the subject as either the heart or pebble. This allows for further contemplation by the reader, producing questions such as, what does the last ripple of a used-up heart look like? When was a time that my heart felt that way? These are questions I want my own writing to produce.
Enjambment became an area I focused on throughout my revisions. When comparing past drafts to my completed portfolio, it is easy to see where I changed line breaks in an effort to shift the emphasis and allow for possibilities like Hirshfield. One example of this is the opening stanza of Salvaged. I originally had the opening line, “You are the girl constantly losing her shoes”, however during revision I placed a line break after losing. Now the opening line reads, “You are the girl constantly losing”, this allows for a more universal ‘you’ and draws attention off the shoes and onto the loss, which is the real emphasis.
Many of my poems appeal to this universal ‘you’ in an attempt to show a pattern and accentuate common experience. All of the poems in this portfolio are a reflection of relationships and the way our emotions intertwine with our relationships. I wanted to emphasize the validity of these emotions and the helplessness of them.