Sex with Seraphim
Personal Statement:
Sex with Seraphim, like Castles and Drafts, is a collection of works made for yet another creative writing course at university. Prior to this class, the only workshop I had done was “Fictionalizing Life,” where we took our personal experiences and wrote short stories from them. I’ll have to admit that I was probably the harshest critic in that class, in that I was never very pleased by the works of others. I had been writing short stories since high school, so I’d built up this sort of illusion that I knew how to write when, in fact, I wasn’t much better or worse than anyone else.
Poetry, on the other hand, was something I never knew how to approach. No rhyme I ever wrote was natural – it was always contrived or slanted in one way or another – and I never had much faith in my ability to write in meter. This was in addition to the fact that I saw free verse as lazy, and although I’d written in it a number of times, I couldn’t consider myself a poet because of how much I relied on it. This wariness of poetry was cause for me to let go and write as I pleased throughout course. I saw it as a learning experience guided by experimentation, and in the end I like to think that I learned what I was capable of and shed my negative view towards free verse.
I saw a TED talk a while ago in high school about the nature of the genius. In ancient Roman mythology, a genius was not a person, but a spirit that was responsible for someone’s creative output. In this sense, it was not the person, but the genius who made creative works of art, literature, or ideas. This concept stuck with me for a long time; long enough for me to keep thinking about it even today. I won’t say that I believe in spirits - as convenient as it would be, I don’t think the concept is grounded in anything outside of superstition - but even so, imagining my work as the result of another entity made it easier to take a step back and enjoy it for what it was. Maybe it’s a roundabout method of putting my head up my ass, sure, but it did make it easier to acknowledge a few unfinished poems and the first draft of “Stańczyk” as complete pieces of shit. Even so, “Venetian Corpse” and “An Unsent Letter” blew me away because they were so out of the ordinary for what I usually wrote. I enjoyed them not out of pride for my work, but because they made me realize that there was something within me just as capable of writing something beauty as something shit-seeped.
So here's to you, genius. May your words be as glorious as a seraph's moans.
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