driver's seat echo

my new collection & "what it's about"

When you tell people you’re writing a book, they inevitably ask you what it’s “about.” When you tell people you’re writing a poetry collection, they inevitably know exactly what it’s about—it’s about you.

Of course, there are poetry collections that aren’t about an individual. We’re talking fictional tales, fairytale retellings, reworkings of Ovid—but in the grand schemas that we all play by, we all know writing is how we work ourselves out through words. Poetry is, often moreso than prose, more telling, if you listen. It might be harder to parse through with all its metaphors and abstractions, but poetry is impulse incarnate. It’s the first phrase you think when you hear the color blue. It’s the first odd adjective you use to describe your neighbor. And to those who will argue that we edit—we edit for precision, to make it all the more true.

I wrote driver’s seat echo while I was doing my Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry. It wasn’t actually my thesis project. In fact, none of my advisors had ever read any of the poems in this book. I was hard at work on an experimental, avant-garde epic poem. But after all the years I’d spent scrawling away in journals, lyric poems were my lifeline. When I had no idea what I was doing in my thesis, I wrote a poem about it. I wrote about how I was so alone, how I was so so so distantly moored on this island of thought that nobody seemed to be able to navigate.

The title of this blog post is the title of the collection. It comes from a poem called “gargle.” (Side note: this poem is available on a sweatshirt! You can buy it and wear your existential dread on your back! Proceeds go to me and my future nacho cheese unpaid gigs!)I’ve included it here:

and the worst part about it all is that it passes,
a song that roughly translates to what you’ll be
doing. your shapewear feels stretched these days,
and you remind yourself that you will be in the
driver’s seat with this echo, and so you remember
how it feels for hands to touch regardless. you remember
you are ten feet taller than you anticipated you would be after
mortar and pestle took to spine. ground you
up, dried tenderly by the strings of your underwear
hung in formation. imagine sold out crowds and hospital
beds. imagine you get a spot. imagine that it changes
your life and you spend every other moment after as a
familiar. a ghost. running through. again and again. your
parents still call you with the same offenses. sisters simply
don’t call you at all. you get the thing you wanted but it’s
dripping in cheese. you hate cheese. not all cheese, but
definitely the nacho chip cheese that these unpaid gigs
melt into. you’re at a high, you’re at a high, you’re
at the lowest your bank account has been in months.
and the worst part about it all is that it passes.
and then comes back again, some transit-using
beast that meets you at the next bus stop as you run,
and it’s a creep, and you’ve known too many creeps,
so you giggle when you think of the server who stopped you
to call you beautiful and disappeared into the kitchens,
and you know that it passes. the skyscrapers inhale, exhale
into the starless, clear night. the city plays conductor.
a song that roughly translates to what you want to hear.

The poem is the centerpiece of the book. Is it the best poem? Probably not. (Actually, it’s definitely not. The best poem is the last poem in the book, and you can fight me on that.) But it is the poem that makes this book feel like an all-encompassing time capsule of the past two years.

During the years of my MFA, the years I spent writing this book, I was working as a Teaching Artist, driving all over the San Francisco Bay Area to teach poetry in schools. When I would get back to my car to drive home, I would sit in the parking lot and read the poems they had gifted me, or stare at the drawings they had made me, or flip through the massive stack of cards I’d been keeping for my scrapbook at home. I would sit in the driver’s seat and feel the echo of everything. I’d hear each word in the students’ voices. I’d hear Sam Fender through the car speakers. I’d call my friends on the way home. I’d think about what dinner I would cook with Daniel. I’d be alone, so alone—but not because there wasn’t sound. I was alone because I didn’t recognize the voice in my own head. I had come to realize that I was miles and miles away from the girl I was when I’d started sneaking pencils into my room at the hospital to write poems at night.

Today, sitting in the package room of my apartment building, there was a little envelope addressed to me. Sitting inside was the first printed proof of this book. This book. This precious book I’d been chipping away at for the past (now) three years. And when I thought about it, I thought about how—in some ways—maybe that voice in my head hadn't really changed at all. While I was working during the mornings, plugging away at this unmanageable beast of a thesis in the afternoons, and spending time with my friends in the evenings, I somehow still managed to steal time away from everything and write about myself. This was who I was. This was who I was becoming.

I say that all of my books are time capsules. So much so that, after a few years, I tell my publishers to stop printing them. If you’ve got a copy of any of my previous books, consider yourself lucky—they’re not seeing the light of day otherwise. And that’s because of my original thesis: I was, and always have been, writing about me.

And maybe that’s what “gargle” is about. Hell, maybe that’s what driver’s seat echo is about. Everything I’ve ever been has been fickle, changing, and yes—the worst thing about it all is indeed that it passes. But for now, the city plays conductor. And I hope the song it’s singing… roughly translates to what you want to hear.