Some Context
For me, writing poetry is a therapeutic act. It enables me to express ideas or imagine versions of myself that I would otherwise find difficult to explore.
When I wrote The Personal, I had been at Oxford for about a month and felt like I was becoming a new person. (In many ways, I am more comfortable in myself now than I was then; as a result, I am not writing much poetry.) The Personal enabled me to reconcile two versions of myself: - my former self at Westminster who was a thoughtful, introspective, hiphop-loving teen (and I guess hiphop was a key way of marking myself out as different and knowledgeable while still being credible); and the self I was becoming - much more sociable, outgoing, immersing myself in a range of different social groups.
I began to develop a classic English combination of traits - identifying myself as introverted, but presenting myself as extroverted (at least, I am much more extroverted in company than I normally am alone; whether other people see me as such, I don't know). A model figure of this type would be my dad, who said last week "A lot of people don't realise quite how introverted I am." Yet as a friend of his said last week, my dad has this strength of personality that enables him to create a world around him. With great cheer and warmth, my dad projects an aura of sociability and engages with a huge range of friends; yet if you watch him in company, you can sometimes observe him switching off in order to attend to his own thoughts. He turns inward with much discretion. This is a useful habit to acquire and I fully intend to master it myself.
Anyway, back to myself in November 2006, I was making friends with lots of girls. This created issues of desire. No one struck me clearly as someone with whom I shared a lot personally, and I only wanted to kiss someone with whom I shared a lot personally. So I felt stuck, and that's what laid the foundation for writing the poem.
An Introduction to the Poem
I was still making up my mind about issues of desire and sex. Modern media often tells young people that it's good to experiment with sex when you're at uni so that you can discover who and what you like. And we can all see the sense in that, even if it involves a shallow, almost consumerist attitude towards romantic engagement. Try before you buy!
But actually the shallowness caused me quiet disquiet; and it was a feeling I'm sure other people shared. So I decided to write a poem in which two voices offer their thoughts on issues of desire.
One voice is lonely, solipsistic. This voice selfishly regrets our dependency on other people; the 'I' views our dependency on others for sexual satisfaction as both a nuisance and an impediment to personal integrity.
The other voice is collective. This 'we' expresses more complex and mutual states of desires; yet 'we' has a curious lack of interest about who is desiring. It presents what I suppose is the extreme of the socially normative attitude towards sexuality - have sex with someone! Give in, it says - it's so good! Who cares who it's with? I've met quite a few girls who had sex for their first time to 'get it over and done with.' To me, that's so weird. I still can't get my head around it.
Now, here's a link to the poem: -
The Personal
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See the next blog for more on the poem.
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