I Keep Writing about Fish

Instructor Introduction

Ashley’s video essay “I Keep Writing About Fish?” hooks the viewer in with brilliant (or should I say gill-iant) questions, immersive drawings, and inventive poetry to investigate why fish are often featured in their writing. While the conversation starts from a point of unease with the creatures, we’re taught that “fish can be a metaphor for everything,” encompassing our fears and the subconscious. The essay’s fantastic pacing, humor, and connections to fish-adjacent texts helps us consider how writing can be like attending to or picking at a wound—does it help our discomfort?

— Chris Crowder

Transcript

ACT I: PSYCHOANALYSIS & LORE DUMP

[Typewriter effect]:

I keep writing about fish.

Why?

[Some sort of transition]

“Why” is a good question. Why fish? Why write about it? Why keep writing about it?

I’m afraid of fish. I don’t like them very much.

The first memory of fish-fear I have is being a kid at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, terrified in front of the shark exhibit. I have always been a catastrophizer. If the glass were to break—it would be genuine tons of water, pouring down upon me, and one big fish. I can’t swim. The shark is native to water. The math is easy to do.

The fish-fear hovered in my mind after that. I realized that I really hated deep sea fish, and then large fish—as in, any fish that is large. And now it’s just—a general unease around any fish, at all, if it is alive and swimming.

So, okay. I’m afraid of fish.

The next question: why write about it?

ACT II: CREATIVITY AS A VEHICLE TO FIGURING OUT THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE VERY MUCH

I’m certainly not the first person to write about fish. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which is a strange and meandering book, has about five and a half pages dedicated to a meditation on the herring. How they migrate, how they are caught, how they glow when they die. How we, as humans, don’t actually know what they feel. We don’t know what fish feel when they are confronted by humans—but I know how I feel when I am confronted with them.

When I say that I keep writing about fish, I mean it.

Here are some of the half-finished poems. All About Fish:

My dad drags me out of bed to go on a walk

fish in the river / freaky in length / raw & infinite
fish / raw & infinite fear / big splash when dad drops
dinner in / leftovers in / my lunch: in the river / me: lunch
in the river / big splash when i drop in & what’s up? god
is one freaky fish / god is the snap / god is the bite / god
is up next / god is in me & i’m up next / be not afraid
fish / i do not believe you to be delicious / i’m only hoping
for a good ending & i must specify / good ending:
not by fish / be happy: good fish / be not delicious
me: good ending / be not sad god: there are freakier fish still
be freaky god: i have not yet been consumed

Like the Vitruvian man,

I have a rod spine
and fishing line arms. Two hooked thumbs
up. I am fishing for myself. My mouth
is open. I bite. I get a catch. I dig deep
and snag twice. One thumb per fleshy cheek. Holes
on each side of the face. It should be easy,
and it is—just get into the gap where the jaw
connects to itself. Smile. Pull.

[Narration]:

Sometimes, it feels as if all of my fish poetry begins to blend into one as I keep revisiting the subject. How much can one person have to say about fish? Maybe all of it is becoming one giant Franken-creature.

I had a nightmare like that once. It was, funnily enough, about Spongebob. A show with a bunch of fish as characters. In this dream, there is a blob that keeps consuming people. Consuming fish. Consuming fish-people. Like a freaky osmosis. The blob grows bigger. It wants me. It wants my mass. It wants my being to become one with it.

I stopped watching Spongebob after that. But maybe that’s what my poetry wants to become. One big, ugly fish.

In Diana Khoi Ngyuen’s Ghost Of, she introduces a series of poems all titled Gyotaku. Gyotaku, a method Japanese fishermen originally used to print their catches, that later evolved into an art form in its own right. These poems play with form, repeatedly pasting text over and over again, often with overlap. My fish poems do not, but perhaps they are a more metaphorical version of gyotaku—every fish poem is me printing and reprinting this strange fear, over and over again. As a way to record them, mark down their size and shape. As a way to say: this is what I have caught.

How much can one person have to say about fish? The answer is a lot. Fish can be a metaphor for everything, I think .

Picture this: it’s summer of 2021, and I’m just starting to write poetry about the things that matter to me, instead of poetry that only imitates what I think poetry should sound like. This is an excerpt from one of my poems from that era, written for a poetry workshop. It’s about being queer.

Fish as a metaphor for everything.

We’re at the bay,

a tethered boat, stink slithering
through the air. I’m talking about fish again. The soft,
tender underbelly. The bones and spine
in the trash and the blood under my nails. I’m talking about
the salt and the spray and the sun as well, yes, but mostly
the fish. You know what’s the funniest thing about
fish? You ask a man to picture a monster
and he gives you an animal, a beast, something decidedly-
not-human. But to a fish? A monster
is just a bigger, freakier fish. One with more
teeth. One with sharper teeth. A swooping
jaw and a dark, hungry mouth. A really mean
bite. The fish probably have it right.
It really is far too easy to slip from man
to monster.

[Narration]:

That work is… old and not my best. But I wrote it before I had my fish epiphany—and yet, even then, I was thinking about fish. And I was thinking about how queer folk are ostracized and othered and depicted as predators and how the most horrifying thing in the world, to some people, is just another person, yes, but I was also thinking about fish.

And I keep stitching together these poems into new ones. When I have nothing else in my head to write, I default to fish. I regurgitate everything I’ve already made to say anew. Here is something I wrote during poetry club one day:

Untitled

Hey. I’m talking, again, about the fish (from We’re at the bay,)
and how they swarm
around my leftovers (from My father drags me out on a walk)
in the river. I’m talking about the fish
and how they snap
towards my crumbs.
I’m talking about myself, leftover
in the river. I’m talking. I’m meaning
It. I’m not just saying bubbles
and splashing. I’m talking about
fish scales stench. I’m talking about
mouth wire line. I’m fishing. I’m digging. (from Like the Vitruvian man,)
I’m digging in my scales and hooking.
I’m a fish floundering against the tug.
I’m a fish gaping. I’m open. I’m easy.
I’m hooked.

[Narration]:

There’s something about how I can’t stop digging into this wound. Leslie Jamison has this personal essay called I Met Fear On The Hill. In it, she describes going through a novel written by her mother’s first husband, describing their relationship and subsequent breakup. Jamison writes:

“The fork in this road is starkly asymmetric: Sheila is determined to end the marriage, and Peter is devastated. His pain is operatic and eager to express itself … During their separation, he finds himself playing guitar at a party one night: ‘I reach into the open wound and bring the pain out like an eel wriggling on the end of a hook, hold it up, glory in it.’”

Fish, right?

I come back to this quote a lot. The imagery, the eel wiggling in the wound. Digging in that wound. I’m the type of person where, when I get a bruise I keep pressing on it even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Every scab I’ve ever gotten gets picked open by my ever-anxious hands. Eternal pinprick wounds that never heal because I cannot leave it be. I love fishing in my wounds.

Okay. So, again, that eternal question: why?

This part I’m still not so sure about. I think that maybe there is some part of me that believes writing about my fears will make them lessen, somehow. That, by being able to relate fish with so many poems, scraps, lines, diction, syntax, that it will be easier to deal with. That, if I can outline the shape of my discomfort with my words, then it will be easier to wrangle.

But, is that true?

Well. I don’t know yet. I did model this project after one of those video essays I can waste endless hours with on YouTube—but unlike a lot of them, I don’t have a neat conclusion, or call to action to give you. But I think that’s why I write—to keep on learning about these things, and to keep interrogating them, and to keep questioning them. The way I think about fish now is far different than the way I thought about fish two years ago. I’m sure it’ll be different again in another two years.

I posed the question of how much fish poetry can one person write earlier, and I answered with a lot. But I think that dodged the implied question there: is there such a thing as too much fish poetry? And my answer to that is no, or at least not right now. Not for my purposes.

So yeah. I’m going to keep writing about fish.

And I’m going to keep casting that fishing hook shaped question mark and seeing what I reel up.

Image Credits:

https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/deep-sea/gulf-mexico-deep-sea-treasure-trove-fishes

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deep-sea-fish

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishabassi/terrifying-deep-sea-creatures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

https://animation.fandom.com/wiki/Category:SpongeBob_SquarePants_characters

https://www.britannica.com/animal/eel