I am manic, I am sad, I am aggressive, I am violent, I am straight, I am
dirty, I am thirty-seven, I am a loner, I am a walker, I am a street-
walker-to-be, I am indulgent, I am an anarchist, I am a joker, I am
authoritarian, I am a zombie, I am frightened, I am frightening, I am
frantic, I am an early-riser, I am a drunkard, I am a bastard, I am ord-
inary, I am a-social, I am anti-social, I am non-sociable, I am
incomprehensible, I am here, I am there, I am now, I am gone, I am a
loser, I am a winner-to-be, I am careless, I am problematic, I am
irresistible, I am unacceptable, I am innocent, I am guilty, I am far-
sighted, I am strong, I am greedy, I am retarded, I am a talker, I am
a friend, I am a masseur, I am a sociologist, I am a listener, I am a
speaker, I am silent, I am quiet, I am restless, I am uprooted, I am
lonely, I am unbalanced, I am balancing, I am a breadwinner, I am a
hypocrite, I am a hypochondriac, I am precise, I am hostile, I am
a purist, I am intense, I am sensitive.
So I am told, and I believe it, I do, I have to, I do, honestly, naturally,
without asking questions, without wanting to know why I am.‘I Am Told’ (de Wit 1986, p. 11)Despite the fact that the poet uses the first person persistently here, he does
not talk about himself in a way which attempts to describe the specifics of
his own personality and individual situation. Instead he lists many differ-
ent selves which are contradictory (the list veers towards self-criticism but
is by no means entirely self-deprecatory). In fact, the list is so wide-ranging
that it emerges as the possible description of almost anyone, rather than
one particular person.
To create a split-self poem (Exercise 1a), you might want to write down
sets of contradictions next to each other and see if you can transform them
into a poem, for example:
- I feel tearful/I’m full of joy
- I like my work/my daily routine is drudgery
- I need to write/my words don’t say anything.
Notice how the phrases do not cancel each other out but reverberate with
each other to express ambivalence.
Or find a narrative or situation (or narratives and situations) which
help to accentuate the idea of the split self.
Or create a list poem which evokes the split or splintered self using the
de Wit poem as a model.
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 161