Identity is like a prism or a diamond: there are many different ways we view our own identities, many different aspects to our personalities, many different histories through which we define what we consider to be our selves. The light refracted through the different surfaces of the prism shoots out in all directions, making a single definition of identity impossible. Steven Cordova’s “Of Sorts” is a good example of a prismatic identity poem. First and foremost (particularly for the writer), we are what we document. Cordova’s narrator is “faithful to that morning diary entry” and later on admonishes “write it down./ Or it will leave you.” The concrete nature of the word, its presence as a solid object, encapsulates the speaker’s identity, gives a narrative proof of the existence of the self. Parallel to this existence in words, there is also the life of the body. As thinking beings, we know no life without this. The body both does and does not belong to “us.” It does what it does often without permission from the intellectual mind. The body contains us. The body constrains us. We can never be more intelligent than the allowed potential of our minds. We can never achieve more than our bodies, our individual makeup, will permit. One man’s body designates that he can be a contortionist; another body allows only rigidity. Disease and disability define identity and are beyond the control of the intellectual mind. The body will do what the body will do. For this reason, Cordova’s poem brings us again and again to the body and its urgency. For the narrator, “the appointment with the doctor’s cold scope at noon” is a defining characteristic. If identity is defined by a person’s repeated actions, this recurring visit to the doctor, the “good-bye and hello” of it, becomes part of the narrator’s definition of the self. Cordova also ends the poem with the body: “You’re awake again, and must attend to something all too real, the need to pee.” Thus, the poem becomes a capsule for the self, the body containing the meat of the poem within, like a nesting doll. 

There is a point in the center of the poem where the focus of identity turns from the exterior self to the interior self: from the body to the life of the mind and the dreams that it nurtures. This narrator’s dreams are antagonistic, illustrating for the dreamer his disbelief (or unfaithfulness) in himself and his discomfort with his present circumstances: “you’re in a place you’ve never been: a place you didn’t plan to go; but a place you did buy the ticket to.” This talk of dreams occurs in the center of the poem, following the circular motion the author has designed. In the center of the poem also appears a point where focus shifts from the narrator’s definition of identity to other people’s definition of his identity: “to begin, you’re in the home you’ve made for yourself; then you’re in a home others made for you.” This statement illustrates that there is a part of us that we define by what we believe are other people’s perceptions of us. An old adage states that there are three parts to the self: who we believe we are, who others perceive us to be, and who we really are. There are other triad groups that are used when referring to the self: “the Id, Ego and Superego," the “me, myself, and I,” the “Past, Present and Future.” Since Cordova’s poem reads like a capsule, we might expect to find in Cordova’s poem, a third inner layer nestled between the life of the body and the life of the mind. Is it coincidence then, that directly in the center of the poem, seven lines from both the top and the bottom, and directly in the middle of the page, we have the two words, “everything is?” Could this be the true self? The ineffable, indescribable self? Can one actually know oneself? Is who we actually are indefinable and unexplainable? Cordova is not talking about what happened to us in the past or what will happen to us in the future, but what currently is. Who we are now, unable to be examined and made sense of using the clarity provided by time and distance. Like stepping back from an impressionist painting, we desire to put ourselves in some sort of narrative form, to make sense of our identities and who we are, yet, in reality, all we have to hold on to is that “everything is.” In the up-close and personal view of the painting, we can divine the individual strokes and colors, but we cannot make sense of the painting as a whole. We are too close to the actual self to see it clearly, so we can only be what we are in that moment: the emotions and actions of each passing second. The poem moves in between these views, starting at a point standing back from the individual and approaching closer and closer until identity becomes blurred and unrecognizable, like a telescope narrowing in on an object until it becomes shapeless. Then Cordova pulls us back again, brings us back to the word, back to the body. Ultimately, as his last line suggests, the only things that we have of ourselves are things we are eventually bound to let go: “to expel what, for such a short time, was yours and yours alone."  

Through his positioning of the words within the poem, Cordova makes two parallels: the word is the body and the dream is the mind. In between these two, there is everything else. 

Finally, a brief word on the form of the poem. Cordova could have used any number of line breaks or created any shape for his poem, but the circular nature of the work leads me to believe that he might have found line breaks to be distracting from the poem's internal form. The poet begins and ends with statements about the body and writing, in the center of the poem is talk about the mind and dreams. He even uses the words "round trip." If the poem were arranged in lines instead of one solid block of text, we would not be able to see the circular pattern or appreciate the regularity of its shape. Is the form reminiscent of the "circle of life?" Is it meant to draw our attention to the presence of death (we were made from the dust and to the dust we will return)? I don't know for sure, but it definitely seems to me that any other arrangement would not even allow these considerations to be possible. 

H.K.