In grade school I had classmates who sharpened their pencils before each use, perfecting every meticulous stroke. I only sharpened my HB #2 when the lead completely blunted or broke. My words pressed down hard— weighted, self-assured, imprinting my passion on subsequent pages. graphite grinding through paper, hands cracking, cramped, scribing conviction, forsaking control. My classmates would never lend me the tools of their craft, too precious about their pencils, perhaps, too fearful, apprehensive of whatever contagion drove me to abandon polish and precision, afraid that in lending to me, their pencil, too, might rouse to siphon their soul.
Hi Hanna!
This is such an intelligent piece you've crafted. I love when poets find new & interesting angles for an ars poetica. I feel the opposition you draw between the ritualization (or deferred necessity?) of sharpening becomes the central pressure point { ;) } of this poem.
Your speaker is waiting until bluntness forces the issue, which I took as an enactment of insistence vs. refinement — rhetoric is driven out of us. You do a great job of reinforcing this with muscular, tactile diction: "pressed down hard", "graphite grinding", "hands cracking". These stylistic choices position the act of writing as abrasive. And to take it even further, you've enacted this with the formal weight, enjambement, and stanza breaks. Lineation itself says no to symmetry and polish. I love when a writer is attentive to such nuance.
You show a real mastery of social intelligence. The classmates' refusal to lend pencils becomes as much allegorical artistic gatekeeping as childish possessiveness. Love the idea of a "contagion" — I often worry my creativity is transmissible and corruptive haha.
This piece is quite musical, and I appreciate how it even kind of sounds ugly (I mean this as a huge compliment, and I know you understand that). You favor hard, dental consonants throughout, including some of the ones I mentioned before, but also "cramped", "scribing", "graphite", that enact the friction of the speaker. These alliterative clusters aren't pretty — they're very raspy and deliberate. Repeated gr and cr sounds grind like graphite against paper. Many of the vowels skew short and stressed, which doesn't allow the reader to relax with lyric elongation. You have a music background by any chance?
The "siphon their soul" final note is brilliant, and elevates your central metaphor to a place of metaphysical anxiety. The thought that true expression costs something irretrievable is a downright awful one for a poet to have.
Quick personal aside: In third grade, I was already certain I would be a writer. We had a timed writing prompt, and midway through my sixth sheet of lined paper, my pencil snapped and the tip of the graphite landed in my eye! Luckily, I escaped with just a minor abrasion, but your piece quickly returned me to that memory.
This is really lovely writing.
incredible