Rewriting Old Stuff Part 1
I was going through old notebooks and found a poem that I wrote as a teenager, and I thought it worth revisiting.
I’ve been afraid to leave a mark
To make strikes that blemish the page
The ink against the page’s too dark
For my unsteady hands to gauge
But this book is of no use to me
Sitting empty on my dresser
I have words that I want to see
Of which I am the possessor
So please ink, don’t blot, run, or spill
Please hands, don’t direct the pen wrong
While these pages with words I fill
Leaving behind my soul’s fair song
I believe I wrote it to be the first thing I wrote in a pretty notebook I had gotten around that time. However, I never wrote it down in that book. Until today, there was only one thing written, and unfinished at that.
In high school, it would have taken me hours to write it down. I would have made pencil lines to keep everything straight, practiced on a different sheet of paper to measure the space I needed for each word, and carefully inked my dip pen. I was new to calligraphy, and while I loved it, I was terrified of making mistakes. To this day, I can’t write something in pen or marker without making at least one mistake, so I often write on loose sheets of paper to minimize the impact of the mistakes. It came to no surprise to me that I was too scared to write something in a book, despite the themes of the poem.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how creation necessitates mistakes and lost potential. I often hold myself back from finishing things because I’m afraid the product won’t measure up to my vision. Those are some of the thoughts and feelings that I tried to put into a new version of my poem.
With scrawling lines of dark
Displayed like insect wings
The life of fleeting things
This evening, I grabbed a calligraphy marker and put both poems down in my empty notebook. I think I’ve grown as a writer over the last decade, but that earnest poem I wrote all those years ago deserved to be put down in ink just the same. Unfortunately—or fortunately, my hand did direct my pen wrong. It’s easy to lose track of where you are in a word when doing calligraphy. At least it is that way for me. And then I left out a word and decided to put it back in in a way that ruined the rhyme. I honestly had forgotten that the poem was supposed to rhyme.
I considered starting again on a new page. No one would know but me. However, I thought that was rather antithetical to the point of both poems. It’s okay to make mistakes, even when they are in a book with a pretty cover. That’s part of the art sometimes. Especially when it’s meant for you.
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