Workshop Series #5: to lie & to fail.

How do we withstand the utter fucking embarrassment of being known? Beats me. Let's write about it.

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Here’s a question I’m thinking about: How do we withstand the utter fucking embarrassment of being known? Beats me.

Being in community and kinship networks means being in long relationships with people that have witnessed me fuck up, seen me fail, and watched me make a complete ass of myself - sometimes doing so right alongside me. This is the price we pay to be known, I guess. The alternative is to disappear into the void and work as a pump clerk at a gas station in Tasmania - which, believe me, I’ve considered (and am still considering, ok). Can you imagine? No social media. No history. No ancient videos of outdated poems. No old Myspace photos. A dream! But instead: we choose to write poems that delve into our deepest truths. Our biggest failures. Our wildest dreams.

You may have seen this photo before. Or maybe you were there in the audience! This is 21-year-old me performing at my first National Poetry Slam. I wrote a poem about my father’s mental illness and performed it in a packed basement bar front of complete strangers. This dark secret I’d been carrying around like a briefcase was now.. there. In the Cantab in Boston. Before I could make it to the stairwell and out on to the street many, many poets came up to me and told me how moved they were by my work - and it kept me writing.

I started reading poems on open mics when I was 19 years old - that’s a long ass time to say embarrassing shit in front of a lot of other people. I’ll tell you this: amongst my failures and my growing pains, I have been remarkably lucky to be deeply loved along the way. Being a writer alongside other writers allowed me to write and process my shortcomings, failures, ignorances, and Big Questions and be known and loved and taught in the process.

As I’ve said before: allowing ourselves to be known is allowing ourselves to be loved.

Anyway. Let’s get into these poems and this prompt, shall we?