Metaphysical Decomposition

Jack Cahillane

Two barren suns strafe my soul,

As the mitochondria in my heart deteriorate

And evaporate into the apathetic night sky

Some indifferent cosmic order,

Bereft in love and mercy,

Consumed by the consumption of conscience,

Monopolizes the fibers of all that I was

Thus, I lay in the dark, destitute,

Forsaken by faith and disowned by devotion,

Watching meekly as my person pixelates into oblivion

Interview by L. Valena

January 31, 2022

Let's start from the top. Can you describe the prompt that you responded to?

The prompt that I got was very interesting to me because it's a totally different medium than I'm used to. I'm not sure if it was a scarf or a tapestry, but it was a really beautiful design that incorporated a lot of different elements, some celestial elements, some more earthly elements, with a degree of flow that made it sort of cyclical in nature. What I got from it was a sort of cosmic cycle. One of the earthly elements looked like it was a dead body, not human in nature, but something that was giving energy off into the cosmos. I thought that was a really beautiful piece. It definitely put me out of my comfort zone in terms of things to analyze, but it was really a pleasure to look at it and dive into it a little bit more.

Can you talk about where you went from there?

My first reaction was honestly like, Oh Lord, what did I get myself into? I didn't know how to approach this! So many different elements that I didn't really know how to grasp. While I do some visual art and I definitely appreciate visual art, I'm more musically inclined, poetry inclined. I'm much better at expressing the themes that I like to express through words. So looking at somebody else's artistic expression was really interesting because I had to put it through my lens. I wanted to still remain faithful to what they were trying to get across with their piece, but I didn't really know. I looked at the various elements and what looked like energy flow and I tried to express that through poetry. I typically write poetry in rhyme and meter. I tend to use AABB rhyme a lot because I like the urgency that that rhyme pattern promotes through a poem. But with the different expressions, the various stages that I see in the progression, I didn't think I could actually express those feelings through a rigid rhyme and meter. So I went more with a free verse style. I actually really enjoyed the process because it allowed me to venture into different word play that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to and to be more selective with where I use alliteration. I tried to create a poem that expressed a sort of existential questioning of energy, of life, with a degree of confusion and going on with a character that isn't sure where their place is in that grand energy flow.

Wow! I love this idea of using rhyme and meter to promote a sense of urgency. Is that something that you explore in your other work?

Yeah, there's a poem that I wrote a while ago called Winter’s Woe, which I think is one of my better works because it uses that that pattern. I'm no Homer. I don't write epics. I try to keep things very concise because to me the appeal of poetry as a mode of expression is the ability to take complex themes and condense them into a very concise message. That's the challenge of poetry, which I try to take on when I write. And I find that an AABB rhyme scheme really pushes a narrative forward. So when I'm writing more of a narrative structure, that's the way I tend to go. It creates a sense of forward motion within a poem, not returning to the rhyme of the previous lines until a final stanza, where I will typically go AABA just for a sense of finality.

That’s cool. I think it's interesting that you set up parameters for yourself in your regular practice, and then we gave you a totally different set of parameters to explore. It sounds like you gave yourself some space from your usual to explore some new stuff.

When I first started getting into poetry, it was designed to create parameters around myself and formalize the practice a little more. But then that became my comfort zone and I got pretty good at it, so I didn't break out of that pattern. That's what I appreciated so much about this prompt. It gave me the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone. When I sit down to write a poem on a theme of my choosing, I wouldn't otherwise do [something different] because I know what I'm good at and I tend to stay with that. Breaking out of that rigidity was really really refreshing. I've never really written free verse before. It's always been so intimidating because you don't have the crutch of a nice rhyme or meter to have an appeal if your words aren't all that great. It's really focused on what words you choose. When I shared this piece with some of my friends, I found myself having to defend the word choice of “mitochondria” a lot. That was everyone's number-one criticism. “’Mitochondria’ sounds very disruptive.” “It sounds very out-of-place.” One person even called me “obnoxious and pretentious…”

Wow!

…which is fair, but I don't think in this context it applied. I had to defend it by saying, “It was actually a very intentional word choice. It's designed to be abrasive.” The themes I wanted to explore were about this sort of existentialism and fear of the unknown, and I wanted the poem to get slightly easier to read and flow better as it progressed. I used more alliteration in the lower stanzas. In many ways, it's a narrative about an individual who’s accepting the process of transition. You could read it as death, but that could really represent anything. It starts with an initial confusion and [ends with] final acceptance. I find that when I'm struggling with parameters, with a state that I’m in, in the initial shock things are very abrasive and jarring, so I wanted the language of the poem to reflect that. And that's not something I would have been able to do had I stuck to the rigidity that I typically write with.

That's awesome. I find it very exciting when people really answer the call of this project, which invites you to totally jump from whatever you usually do and try something different. We get really good at certain things and we develop them and that's part of the process to write, but it's cool to break out of it sometimes and look at things from a new direction.

Yeah, absolutely. I find myself getting too comfortable at times. I think anytime somebody is overly comfortable in a given form of expression, they fail to push boundaries that they otherwise could, and fail to innovate on their own work. I know that’s certainly true of myself.

Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to talk about?

One thing that's interesting about my process is that it's so nonlinear. And no form of artistic creation is linear. If somebody tells me it is, then I don't believe them or I don't trust them, or both! But there was about a 14-day period from when I got this prompt to when I submitted. I spent about 13 and a half days just looking at it, trying to figure out what on earth it meant to me. I got some themes and some ideas, and then I wrote a handful of drafts using an AABB style, going to the style that I'm comfortable with and that I know how to do. And nothing turned out well. This final product sort of came to be at 3:30 in the morning when I couldn't sleep, and it took about five minutes to get down. I looked at it the next morning and made a couple changes here and there with syntax, and making sure that even though it's free verse, there is a certain degree of flow, despite what my friends think about “mitochondria.” But that tends to be how my process goes. A lot of confusion, a lot of confliction surrounding what I want to express, and then a final epiphany or just a moment of Okay this is what I want to say. And if I don't get it down within like ten minutes, it's gone. I'll never see it again. That's why deadlines are terrifying.

Yes.

But also important. Most of my work gets done right around deadlines.

Do you have any advice for a creative person who is approaching this project for the first time?

Just try. There's no incorrect way to approach an artistic project. I take that back; there is one way and that's not approaching it. There have been so many different attempts to define what art is, people saying, “This medium is art, this medium isn't art,” and I reject all of that. I think if you are expressing something through any medium, that is art. And I think if you are expressing something honestly, it doesn't matter how formal it is. If you have formal training and in painting or singing or writing, I don't think any of that matters. If you sit down and you write something, you paint something, you draw something, whatever your medium is, and you do it honestly, there is absolutely no way you can go wrong. That's what it to me art comes down to: honest expression. And the only way you can get it wrong is if you don't do it.

Call Number: M44VA | M45PPcaMe

Jack Cahillane is a musician and poet currently completing his senior year at Princeton University. Having discovered the power of music at a very young age, Jack found music and poetry to be the most effective means of expression through his personal struggles with mental health and addiction. His work seeks to borrow themes from his personal journey of recovery to convert painful experience into beautiful expression.