NaPoWriMo25 Day 0: Replication Crisis
What a way to herald a new blog! I'll get into housekeeping in a later post, but I like that my first official post on this site is a poem. Convention would suggest that I don't write this down here, but as you may come to learn, my brain is unorganised at the best of times, and that will be reflected on this blog. Oh well, I'm having fun.
Without further ado, the poem!
Day 0: Replication Crisis
You're posed in the mirror,
My hand moving in practiced strokes
Of blind discovery
Using flipbook reference,
Impossible to recreate.
Still, life bleeds through
An unreliable quantum choice
That yields intoxicating results.Follow the line of action
Find the weight-
Heavy under the eyes,
Teeth pulling the words up from
Your shoulders, chest, and pelvis
Guide the arms and legs,
Both yours and mine
Until form becomes sketch becomes shapeA foolish endeavour
To remake yourself
In the best light
To hold myself up
Because I don't know who I am.
I desperately yearn
To be both the curator
And the exhibit
Here is the prompt for the poem, credit to Maureen Thorson from the NaPoWriMo website:
Maybe one of the most common subjects in art is a portrait – a painting of one, singular person. Portrait poems are also very common. To get a sense of the breadth of style and form that these poems can take, take a look at Anni Liu’s prose poem, “Portrait Of”, John Yau’s, “Portrait”, and Karl Kirchwey’s “The Red Portrait”. Now try penning a portrait poem of your own. It can be a self-portrait, a portrait of someone well known to you, or even a poem inspired by an actual painted portrait.
A few things that inspired the poem: Ever so often I like making a self portrait. It's a very personal process, but it's one I tend to agonise over because I want to get it right, I want to portray myself the way I see myself. A combination of art block, bad mental health, and interest in other hobbies has also meant that I really haven't drawn anything in a long time. I've been itching to make a new one- but it doesn't feel right yet.
When I saw the prompt for this poem was "portrait", it felt like an obvious choice to write about this feeling. While brainstorming for titles, I looked up synonyms of "portrait" and stumbled upon "replica". My mind instantly jumped to the replication crisis, an issue in (primarily) psychology and medicine where the results of many scientific studies have been found to be impossible to reproduce. As someone who has spent far too long looking at academic papers, it's something that comes up quite often. I could write a whole other post about that, but the reason I decided to use it as a title was because I think the process of making self portraits is quite similar. I try to emulate myself, but I'm constantly changing as a person. I can never recreate a portrait, because it would no longer be accurate. That, and the fact that "replica" is a close enough synonym for portrait.
Not to be all "the curtains are blue" about this, but I do think it's fun to explain my thought process behind the poem. If you interpret it a different way, that's okay and I even encourage it.
Anyway, that's all for now. Don't expect every post to be like this- I'm just feeling particularly wordy today.