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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

MiddMouth: Featuring Tyler Belmont

This week’s MiddMouth poet is Tyler Belmont ’17. Tyler is from Colorado Springs and is majoring in International Politics and Economics. He enjoys playing bass, writing poems, and advancing the empathy that derives from enlightened cultural exchange, among other things that generally never come close to becoming a self-reliant citizen or eliminating insurmountable sums of student loans.


MB: How would you describe your creative process?


TB: The best creativity comes in bursts and struggles. I find that my better products are expressions between separation’s anguish and the struggle to obtain hope and grace: separation from God or from love and loved ones; struggle for a more perfect understanding; hope for the world we live in. Struggles like these often manifest themselves in an attempt to understand the implications of identity, as well as the degree of individual and collective agency within the channels of history. I find a flavor of the day and let it ferment in a state or place in which I find myself or to which I desire to return. No poem is ever truly resolved. I’m always coming back for revisions, but I also keep the old versions in case I over-revise and need to back-track towards scruffiness.


MB: How would you describe your relationship to poetry?


TB: Ever since my high school English teacher (a former Bread Loafer!) made me lead an hour-long discussion on Wallace Stevens and his “Emperor of Ice Cream,” I’ve found poetry to be a capricious means of digestion. On the best days, it’s like eating something deliciously alive. But in digesting what the world feeds, poetry also has a way of cementing the mind’s rabbit holes. Unfortunately, I find that I often unduly cling to despair so that I might extract a more potent artistic experience, which becomes exhausting. I heard they make meds for that. In somebody else’s words, art can be therapeutic, but it’s no substitute for therapy. This is something I’m beginning to understand; there are weeks when I try and leave poetry alone.


The Pursuit of Dignity


By Tyler Belmont


Salted wood strewn along the frosted shore yields


in flames the warmest of cold comforts, casts


the solitariness of glazed winter to the fringe.


If there is any single truth


that might be granted, let it now be this:


that it is incorrect to say that this is resignation.


Let it rather be the uplift


from an impervious fog, a steady hand


that proffers a tired camaraderie’s comforts


in its palm; cold tablets to be twisted


down the length of the esophagus. And with it


comes the ultimate restoration of a pride,


the unadulterated agency


that once left the side, evading reach


within this aimless fog, and was today


in the tablets’ fleeting sapors


rediscovered.


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