Who Am I Without My Words

The earlier drafts of the poem “Sometimes the Words Are So Close” by Julia Alverez enhance the final draft of the poem; the edits accentuate the entire poem due to the clear dedication that is shown. From the very title of this poem to the last period, it is about words being at the tip of your tongue, the words being so close yet so far. There is a clear struggle to find the right words in her drafts. It is obvious that she put a lot of thought into what was said in the poem; she was her own biggest critic, always second guessing if the words that she put down conveys the message that she wanted it to. This only enhances the meaning of the poem, the complexity of living the way she writes, she writes to where it is so simple that a child could understand it yet becoming the person she writes about is the hardest thing for her. It is also notable that the first line of the poem is always the same, like she was so sure that this was something that she without a doubt wanted to say; the first lines always say “Sometimes the words are so close I am more who I am when I’m down on paper than anywhere else as if my life were practicing for the real me,” the way that throughout all of her drafts, the first line was the thing that always survived and way never altered just shows that those lines were essential to the conveying of the message of the poem, which is that she is more herself on paper then she is in person no matter how much she yearns to be the person she writes about. Another line that stuck out to me was “Those of you lost and yearning to be free, who hear these words, take heart from me. I once was in as many drafts as you.” This stuck out to me because it also accentuates the message, just in a different way, she was lost and yearning to be free and the only way she, the speaker, could do that was by writing it down; so she is now saying take heart for i was once like you, struggling to find the right words to say and the right person to be. 

-Paris Baker