Hirshfield's final and probably most impactful chapter really drove home the idea poetry should push boundaries and capture all the joyful and painful life aspects we experience every day. Everyone's interpretations of this chapter that I've read, Bijan, Matt, and Emma, and all the others who contributed put her words into perspective and cemented this notion that as writers we must be "stepping past what we already think we know and into an entirely new relationship with many possibilities," (Hirshfield 224). We have to be free and step out of the personal boundaries and inhabit our liminal space in writing to fully express and immerse ourselves and readers. Seeing both sides of the liminal space, being in the threshold, I think is how poetry should take form, and what I learned from Hirshfield's final chapter.
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Teresa, I love your interpretation of this chapter. In order to write poetry we need to step away from ourselves. In doing so we should not just become something else, we should become all things, the good things and the bad things. In order to understand this world we need to see everything as it exists together, to understand how the good correlates with the bad.
Hi Teresa, I fully agree with you! After reading the chapter (and like you, reading our classmates contributions) I finally understand how important it is to inhabit those liminal spaces as writers. I think I wrote something similar to Bijan, but it definitely takes a lot of courage to be able to inhabit those spaces, create within in them, and then share our work with others. But then again, I think that's where the most transformative work comes from.
Hi Teresa,
I really enjoyed this chapter. Especially this idea that you brought up that the poet mus free themselves from not just personal boundaries but from every form of boundary - whether it be societal restrictions, clothing, gender roles, religion. It really captures the overall scope of what poetry aims to do, and it's to transform the consciousness. It's not just art, it's not just a performance or a story, it could be all these but at the heart of it all, poetry must exist to serve the poet first and help the poet transform themselves.
Teresa,
I think I am drawing my own conclusions from your post but I am interpreting it as an encouragement to myself, as both a person and a writer, to free myself from the limits that society has confined us to. Furthermore, this is the message that I got from Hirschfield as well. It is interesting to me that we have these unspoken rules that confine us but we as writers have to break free of all of these things that limit us. A perfect example of this was Whitman; he wrote about sex during a time that it was incredibly frowned upon, people were disgusted by it. But one the best known poems--which celebrates people in unique circumstances--came from this. Our duty as writers, if we are to continue to be them when this is over, is to exist in the in between, as someone and no one, and I think that reading your interpretation, Teresa, really helped me break through and figure this out.