Deconstructing Bad Poetry
Are you Trying to Say Something?
Setting: A serene, timeless garden. Sunlight filters through the leaves of an ancient olive tree. SOPHIA, the embodiment of wisdom, sits opposite JACQUES. A simple stone table with two cups of tea is between them.
Sophia: The tea is from a place of stillness, yet you seem to carry a restless wind within you, Jacques. It’s a familiar dissonance. I see a shadow of a young man pacing in your memory.
Jacques: (A faint, ironic smile touches his lips) He is always there. A boy of two minds under the bright Algerian sun. One part of him was folded inward, devouring books, scrawling these… intense, clumsy verses he would send off to small local publications. He was trying to build a world out of words.
Sophia: An attempt to find order. To structure the chaos of feeling into lines and stanzas.
Jacques: If you could call it order. It felt more like a translation of a language I didn't yet speak. But at the very same time, another boy existed. This one lived entirely on the outside. He was out in the streets, full of a kinetic, thoughtless energy. A troublemaker, some would say. He found his expression not in syntax, but in disruption.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
— Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Sophia: So, one self withdrew to read and write, while the other pushed against the world? They seem like opposites. The quiet poet and the rowdy youth.
Jacques: That’s how it felt. A contradiction I lived without understanding. The poems were a private, almost shameful act of creation, and the life on the street was a public, unthinking performance. I saw no bridge between them. One was a retreat from the world, the other a collision with it.
Sophia: But a retreat and a collision are both responses to the same thing, are they not? A poem, however unrefined, is a mark made on a page. A reckless act is a mark made on the smooth surface of a quiet afternoon. They are both a kind of pressure exerted outwards from the self.
Jacques: I suppose… I saw the writing as a failed attempt at meaning and the hooliganism as a surrender to meaninglessness.
Sophia: (She leans forward slightly, her gaze gentle but piercing) Let’s set aside success and failure for a moment. Think of the impulse beneath both. The boy with the pen, trying to wrestle an idea into form, and the boy in the street, letting his body become an exclamation point. In these two very different gestures, with all their youthful confusion and contradiction, tell me… were you trying to say something?
(Jacques looks down at his hands, then out into the sun-dappled garden. A long silence hangs in the air, filled with the weight of a new understanding.)
Jacques: (Softly) Yes. I suppose I was. I was trying to say that I was there. That the world was immense and I was small, but I was present. The poems were a whisper of that fact, and the trouble-making was a shout. I just didn't know they were coming from the same throat.
Sophia: And now you do. All language begins as a noise. You were simply finding yours.
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