Conclusion

I did not set out to write a poetry collection. Most of these poems began in bursts of inspiration––a few lines in the middle of math class, an image that needed to be written down before I forgot it, or a poem written at two in the morning after hours of chemistry review and just before bed. I wrote because I wanted to capture something I was thinking or feeling before it disappeared.

I eventually gathered these poems because I wanted to look back at them and understand who I was becoming as a writer. I chose The Descent of Inanna as the framework because I was drawn to its structure of descent, loss, and return. Inanna enters the underworld knowing that she may not return. At each gate, she is made to leave something behind, until she eventually dies. Yet her death is not the end of the story: she is brought back to life and returns to the world above. I think writing has felt similar to me. Each poem gives something away, and I know it will, but it also gives something back.

Putting the collection together was much less instinctive than writing the poems themselves. I had to accept that some poems, especially newer ones, simply did not belong. I laid the poems out and arranged them according to recurring images and vibes, but also according to the way one poem’s first or last line could lead into another.

As I put the poems together, I began to notice things about my writing that I had never consciously chosen. For one, I noticed that I use the body a lot. Feelings that could stay abstract often end up somewhere physical––in the stomach, throat, mouth, ears, skin, or bones. I also noticed that I use mythology in two very different ways. Sometimes I write from completely inside a character, and sometimes I keep my distance and try to understand them. A lot of my poems also start with something that already exists—a myth, a fairy tale, an idiom, or a familiar phrase—and then change it.

Looking at the poems together also made me think about how much my relationship with form has changed. When I was younger, I was intimidated by form. Rhyme schemes, meter, couplets, tercets, and quatrains all felt stuffy, pretentious, and boring. As expected, and perhaps more commonly, I first fell in love with poetry through free verse. There was a freedom to it that made me feel limitless, as though I could say whatever I wanted and put words wherever I wanted. Then, as I read more poetry, form became something fun, almost more than words. Poe’s “The Raven” made me inexplicably charmed by rhyme; Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” created an obsession with repetition and pattern. Eventually, I began to love experimental forms: words that leapt across the page in strange ways, words that crossed cultures and languages like the bridge they were meant to be, words that came with sounds and movements of their own, not just in my mind but on the page.

I tried ballads and villanelles and pantoums; haikus and haibuns and burning haibuns; imitated Dickinson’s envelope poems and CA Conrad’s creature poems; created my own forms, some strange amalgamation of everything I had loved. When I write, however, I still strain against the rules. I feel like each poem is its own form. I love form as a tool for inspiration and for interpretation, but I still love my freedom. So some of my poems leap. Some of them twitter anxiously on a thin branch. Some of them join the sea of people before them. Some of them sleep without dreaming.

I don’t really know how to explain what this collection means to me. I wrote once that my Instagram account documents my development as a writer, but this collection isn’t really centered around that. It is more like who I was, am, and will be, smushed into one singular thing where no one truly knows what I wrote, or when. It is kind of thrilling.

Some poems I still remember exactly when and why I wrote them: walking alone on campus, the sun shining during finals week; restless one night, tired of school. Others feel like they were written by a completely different person. Poems written years ago feel like they were written yesterday, and poems written months ago feel like artifacts I’d uncovered in the nonexistent garden of my nonexistent ancestral home. It’s funny how they warp time, but wonderful how it makes me feel a little closer to myself.

Some poems I had obsessed over for years already, so I remember why I changed every word or line break. Others were freshly dug out of my Notes app, like some secret treasure I needed to repolish. Some poems have changed a lot, and surprisingly, there are poems that I barely touched. Going back to them has made me realize that I am not quite the same writer who wrote them, even when I still recognize myself in them.

I am still revising these poems. I think I will keep revising them. A friend once told me there is a saying in China that once a work is published, the author is dead. I’ve never felt quite ready to die. When I read the newest version of this collection, I already feel like a different writer from the one who wrote some of these poems. We grow older every day, whether we mean to or not. The first poem I ever wrote for myself was about this. I called it “To Everyone Who Has Ever Been Young.” It was about feeling older than I was, about getting older and changing every second. Maybe that is the strange pleasure of putting them together—I get to meet all these versions of myself at once, even when I’m not entirely sure I like all of them.