Cont. Backstage Poet earns Finalist in Love Poem Contest
I’m still celebrating the fact that:
The amazing, Frontier Poetry lit mag named me a FINALIST in their (Not) in Love Tanka Challenge!!!
This blog is a continuation of my last post. If you’d like to read the harrowing tale of how I overcame my imposter syndrome and literal rejection message that said I was NOT a “finalist” to discover I had actually placed and earned the mention above, click here to get to my last post.
If you’d like a quick catch-up of my experience as a poet, or to see me perform a poem about poetry (probably the most efficient way to glean the creature I am), check out the Poet page on my site here.
And if you’re looking at this going, “Faith I thought you were an actor”- read on!
I wrote these poems on stage!
Last winter I had the great good fortune to be cast in a mainstage show at school. That’s a whole other blog post for now, just know that unlike most MFA programs, I’m competing with my cohort and all the undergrads for stage time.
Act two would see me tackling a five page monologue in an immersive Starbucks set (and, by all accounts, crushing it) but most of act one I was sat behind frosted glass– an ominous corporate silhouette at a computer.
I took the opportunity to write some poetry. While my cast mates were rehearsing the main drama of the act, I assumed the shape of Faith Marie Kearns writing poetry at a desk was not unlike the shape of my character at work as the managing editor of the culture section at a magazine not unlike The New Yorker.
When my assistant knocked I would be genuinely perturbed– jostled out of the deep reverie necessary to write poetry, the “tranquility” of Wordsworths:
“… spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it [poetry] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
Did this approach take me out of the scene?
Sometimes.
However, I think it helped me map the emotional and psycho-physiological score of my character. Most of actual writing and editing took place during early rehearsals– but I definitely submitted this group of tankas to Frontier backstage during a dress rehearsal. I was totally tuned in for the actual performances.
Ultimately, some of my best writing comes in moments of distraction– scribbling during a lecture or on set.
A consistent habit of inconsistent attention
Writing is habitual for me. I’ve always done it; always needed to do it. As an exhaustively sensitive little girl, writing stories and notes was often the only way I could adequately or reliably communicate.
When I was working as a background actor, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and looking for validation, I’d sneak a small notebook and pen onto the set. Another actor noticed me writing between takes once and said:
“Don’t do that. That’s weird.”
Rude.
No denying that. I could sit here and say that that guy discouraged me from my creative muse and that’s a shitty thing to have done– and I wouldn’t be wrong– but that guy, while blunt, also wasn’t wrong.
Writing poetry is a kind of intimate and intense and pretentious and private thing. The 2010s in Hollywood seemed to be all about networking. I wasn’t doing myself any favors by energetically dropping out of the set and tuning into the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion” necessary to write. Actors know there’s plenty of downtime while filming, and I’m proud that I was trying to make creative use of it, but writing poetry really wasn’t an appropriate choice. Maybe if I’d lifted my head and made more friends I’d be further along in my career. I also probably looked super suspicious scribbling in a memo pad like a 1930s journalist when I’d already signed an NDA.
I’m lucky I never got in trouble.
All that to say, the shower principle definitely applies here. The best ideas, the best poetry, for me anyway, tends to come when the front part of my brain is distracted by a more immediate task– like listening to a lecture or being on set.
Writing what you feel– or NOT
The prompt for the (Not) In Love Tanka challenge is pretty obvious from the title. The challenge went out in winter, as I’ve said, leading up to Valentine’s Day.
We had an opportunity to submit up to five tankas addressing the themes of being in love– or not.
Now, I’m used to thinking of myself as a hopeless romantic. One of my top five favorite movies is Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, which features the maxim:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just love and be loved in return.”
I accepted this as gospel for years.
When I sat down at the computer in the rehearsal room however, I had to meet myself where I was. Where I was (and kind of still am) is a place of deep cynicism and romantic burn out. I hadn’t felt romantic in a long time and in fact the last time I’d attempted to be so– I came away feeling humiliated and manipulated. These days I’m repulsed by the very notion of emotional or romantic intimacy.
It became clear to me that if I was going to write these tankas from any place nearing authenticity, I was going to have to approach it from the (Not) part of the (Not) in Love challenge.
With no loving-feelings to work with, I distilled instead my disappointments, disillusionments, and feelings of dismay into the 31 requisite syllables. I mined my feelings over the overturning of Roe v Wade and the consequences to women’s lives.While they remain bummers, it does feel good to write from a place of authenticity.
[Tankas]
I had the added challenge of writing in a form that was totally new to me.
A tanka is a Japanese poetic form not unlike a haiku, similarly constructed from a set number of syllables. Specifically
5
7
5
7
7
So for example one of my poems goes:
pregnant women killed
by homicide more than birth
my mother country
makes a hazard of our love
and gouges the ones still born
Check out the above poem as a Youtube short here. (And then subscribe please <3 )
Ultimately I only submitted four tankas. I have two more that I’ll be uploading as videos to Youtube and IG Reels in the coming weeks.
I’d like to thank Frontier Poetry one more time for their mention. Validation and encouragement as an artist goes a long loooong way.