Today, I've been working a little on cleaning up the above-named series. Besides having a lot of fun with it, I feel like it's helped me break out my creative rut, something I tried to do with havoc, but it really came to term with this. Not only is the subject matter and voice a bit different from the usual, but there's also a sense of playfulness I usually don't get (largely since I wasn't really taking it all that seriously in the beginning and felt no pressure to make it conventionally "poetic".) Initially, it was meant to be a bunch of letters addressed to James Franco and how annoying people find him to be with his 10,000 graduate degrees and pretentiousness. It eventually turned into more of study on reading and writing poetry within a culture that doesn't prize it all that much, in which Franco serves more as a conceit or vehicle for such meanderings. Also anxieties over gendered writing, truth and untruth in creativity. etc..I was initially going to send some of the poems out piecemeal to journals, but now I wonder if I shouldn't just make them available as a chapbook at some point next summer since they work best all together and are meant to be read in one sitting. Even better, it seems to have broken something open stylistically with the beautiful, sinister project, which is also prose poems, but quite a bit bleaker and more fictional. They feel looser somehow and less like previous work I've done.
