“[Alice Dang] carried a black pen and the responsibility for the life of poetry.”
Alice Dang is sick of putting words together so she decided to replace her name in other people’s work.
She certainly feels terrible for doing so, but it’s better than making up words.
I am done with words, I am done with letters, and I am done with poetry. Ever since my first poem about my period that had made me leap with joy, poetry has become a branding iron that plummeted itself on me, hot and sizzling, leaving an aching scar. It felt exuberant at first, exciting, thrilling, all the synonyms. It was as if I had finally found myself after a long time hiding from myself, and discovered that I was, in fact, a great poet. It was not a ‘great’ in a self-conceited way, but I realized that words unravel before me so effortlessly when it comes to poetry. Words that I wasn’t able to say, feelings I wasn’t able to express, there they were, on a piece of paper in stanzas. And that was then I have decided to care for my burn.
I caressed poetry like a baby. I fed it, raised it, showered it, and made sure it grew properly. And it did. I wrote poems that made me happy, I wrote poems that made me sad. I put myself into poetry and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote more. I wrote until I decided I wanted to share.
Sharing was not an easy task. I’ve always winced at the sight of people reading my writing, let alone me reading it out loud for others. But I found out that my experiences were not rare, they were common among others too. So I decided to share my first poem ever, and it was great. It was like there were a hundred more Alice in town. People nodded, smiled, and sighed a relief at me. That was when I knew my words could do something other than made me feel, it made others feel.
So I started on this adventure of making people aware that they were not alone, that they never were, since the beginning. I succeeded (or I think I did?). The success was not something like the Nobel Prize, it was more something like teaching people that it is okay to be sad. And it was a beautiful thing: to connect with people through arrangement of words. And how relieved I was that to know I wasn’t alone.
But then people start to see my face and see poetry. My face deformed into a stanza, my body is a repetition, and I was not myself anymore. The scar where the branding iron was started to burn. It stung. The sacred word “poetry” was branded across my back in lowercase. And it weighed me down. My dragged feet were heavy with chains, and my shoulders sagged in pain. This title of a poet that I have been flashing to people in public was now a giant bouncing castle. People come and go, see the fun of it and leave. And I’m always left battered and deflated. So when night comes, I try to find my breath to blow the castle up all over again.
And I am officially pleased to announce that I, Dang Minh Hanh, Alice Dang, the Asian tall girl in class 2020, am deflating my own bouncing castle, folding it neatly and putting it in my cupboard. Poetry has been something that brought me joy, and made me discover sides about myself I never knew. But poetry also wore me out. So I am putting poetry down and reminiscing the good times with it, and waiting for the time when I can pick it up like the first time I had.