Walking In and Out of the Skin

Fred D'Aguiar says here:

"The first thing you do as a black poet is unzip the suit of your black skin and walk away from it. The second thing you do as a poet is find that suit of yours that fits you oh so well and step right back into it. That suit paints behind your eyelids so you see it when you dream. That suit is osmotic: it lets out sweat, breathes for you – your biggest organ – and keeps out the elements. All history is in that skin. Poetry plays your skin like an instrument – listen, touch, taste, look, and sniff. Dream-skin. Skin-song. Human."

I don't know if this could have been said better. Walking in and out of one's skin(s), that's what writing is all about. And I know in so many ways, I fail to do it! There are times when I write so much from within my skin, and then, as if to compensate, I walk far away from it. So far that I can't smell the sweat, and consequently, the stuff that I end up writing, becomes nothing!

I have been feeling this acutely ever since I began to work on a re-vision of an old poem. One of the things that I often worry about, my poems tend to grow darn big and bigger as I continue with the revision process. One part of me says, I shouldn't worry too much about it. The material I am dealing with needs space, and everything doesn't have to be the sleek, market-savvy flash fiction. What is more, in my more optimistic moods, I even tend to think, the material will determine its own length. But when I am feeling not so good with myself (like now!), I tend to ask, does it mean I am innately incapable of saying more with less? Doesn't it mean I am failing essentially as a writer/poet? Like the poem I am working now. I would have really liked it to be a three-part short-ish prose poem. But once I got into the actual writing, it began to become bulky. Other voices began to peep in, demanded that I give them at least one line, and in most cases, more than one line. The narrator began to demand more explanation, and before I could understand it very well myself, I again have this nine-part poem, which looks like it could have been its own chapbook! And I am wondering, is it because I have stayed too much within my skin while writing this one?

There is an interesting discussion going on at WOM-PO listserve on this, although the language is very different.And I am wondering, aren't all artistic works autobiographical, in the sense that they are always mediated by the individual artist's sensibilities? But also, in my own experience, whenever I have tried to use autobiographical stuff, rarely could I stay faithful to what really happened. Not because my memory was failing or something, although I am sure it was, but the form itself, the logic of it, demanded that I move away from the realistic logic and pay attention to the narrative-logic instead. For me, this is what I find exciting and scary too. Exciting because I am never sure how my work will transmute the autobiographical details, and scary because almost always it leads me to discover some aspect of my life, which I wouldn't have taken into account had I not begun this process of exploring it through writing. But at the end of the day, it's not strictly autobiographical in that mimetic sense anymore!

I am thinking I should go with "Inking the Hyacinth" as the title for this particular poetry project. How does it sound?