On May 30th, I am slated to finally become a two-time published author. Returning From Exile is a poetic examination of struggle, a work meant to capture the fragility of the human experience, and the difficult slog that it often becomes. Its poems are meant to be complex and demanding to reflect life itself. They can be triggering and downright hard to read from an emotional sense. But this is not a work of defeat, but rather of triumph. By examining the depths to which we’ve been, we come to understand how high we have ascended. And so, we come to understand human struggle as something heroic and profoundly beautiful. I don’t wish to re-write the afterword of the book, you can read that once you’ve hopefully gotten the book. I want to reflect on what this all means to me, and where we go from here.
Climbing a mountain once is an accomplishment. Climbing it twice is an affirmation that the previous achievement was no fluke, and that is what I wanted to prove; that I had the self-discipline and creative versatility to do it all over again. More importantly though, I wanted something that reflected my maturation as an artist, something that showed a willingness to defy conventions and chart my own artistic course, exploring topics and ideas without any need to impress anyone. The main overarching goal though was to use this exploration of external darkness to understand the darkness within, and to make sense of this lingering grief over lost youth. This was a collection born out of the ashes of the pandemic after all, and the dark cloud of loneliness and alienation that set over many young adults. I hope to have been successful on this front more than any of the others.
So what happens next? I do have a number of pieces that could come to comprise a third collection of poetry, but a few long dry spells have made work a bit slow on this front. There are also a couple of unfinished short stories that I need to work on. I want to move towards something new in poetry though. I want to create work that almost feels like a type of seance with the character; something that feels like you’re eavesdropping on his innermost thoughts. And I want to create work that encompasses many ideas into one rather than poems focusing strictly on one idea. I want something holistic, that truly captures the essence of the human experience in all its complexities. In a way, this is an extension of what Returning From Exile was.
Creating such a thing will take some time and some work. Since I’m putting myself into the world of people rather than writing about them from an outside perspective, I have to do the work of getting into character, that is, truly becoming that person I’m writing about. It can be exhausting, especially after the intense mental exertions that led to Returning From Exile. That collection required a dark intensity to create. My new work requires being many people, all within one, and that is very taxing as well. And yet, I find it rewarding because it allows me to see the world with different sets of eyes.
I will report back eventually with a new body of work that will hopefully become the peak of Israel the poet, or something close to it. Hopefully, that will help polish my other writing as well, from my unfinished stories to the blogs. For now though, I keep plugging away.
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