I've spoken before about the one truly useful moment in a workshop, where we went around and discussed motivations for our work--what we intended to do--what we wanted a reader to get from our work--and all very different. Some wanted pure expression of self and sense making, others to conjure the perfect image in the mind of the reader. Others to convey abstract thoughts in concrete form. And poetry of course, does all of these things, can do all of them at the same time I suppose. Or it can also do none of them. When it got to me, I mumbled something about telling a story and people seemed surprised. No one in the group of ten or so shared that goal or paid it much mind. (it actually gave me some context to why I was having difficulty in that particular workshop.)
But yes, I am a narrative poet at my very heart, though I stumble occasionally into more lyrical I-based things. Oh it's all fragmented, both kinds, but most of my projects set out to tell a story. Or maybe that's not right, maybe more that story comes from the framework of the poems, since I rarely definitely know which story I am going to tell (or even whose voice (or voices) I am going to tell it in. But the fun of writing is oft in the hanging of the wash on the line and seeing what you've got. Perhaps it's my start as a fiction writer, but I always look for story and narrative threads in whatever genre I am immersed in, even in non-fiction.
When I was a kid,a teenager, and yes, even occasionally into adulthood, I spent a lot of time plotting out the plotlines for novels, usually horror, usually involving Bronte-like plots of spooky old family homes and women with terrible secrets. There was usually a history of hauntings, at least one ghost, and varying degrees of madness and murder. It was probably the same basic story--orphans, changelings, absent fathers, I just changed up the names. I rarely wrote anything like a novel, having decided I much better liked the creating the characters and plots and not much in the actual work of getting it down right on paper (and why I'm a poet not meant for long hauls.) But I would have notes that I would eventually toss, only to re-imagine the story, or a slight variation of, again in a few months. This is probably why I love plotting out those semesterly murder mysteries so much.
In poems, and the sort of fragmentation I work with in writing, sometimes I start out and have no clue where I'm going. Last year, I completed the chap-length sequence taurus, built only around the idea of the minotaur re-imagined as a teenage boy. It's a story more told by the Ariadne and Pasiphae figures, but it varies. I only knew I was going in a general direction, but what happened developed the more I wrote.
When I was working on my first book, the fever almanac, the poems were a mix of things--of fictions and truths, so it was challenging, especially putting together a first collection to make these things work seamlessly. Subsequent books were very much rooted in stories and less in the personal until 2015 when major characters in minor characters was released. This volume, and salvage, told some stories that were mine, some that were independent of me, but the sections kept them more nicely organized than in previous collections. So you had things like ghost landscapes, which is a little bit of fiction amidst things like the shipwrecks of lake michigan poems and radio ocularia, more rooted in the personal.
But then, some would argue there is very thin line between truth in action and truth in substance. My upcoming Black Lawrence book, sex & violence, operates in a similar way. There are the relationship poems, but there are also pieces about slasher movies and Sylvia Plath. It's probably more that I am always telling a story, just that it's more or less autobiographical to varying degrees.
I was thinking about this particularly since I am putting the finishing touches on the next zine project, ordinary planet, which is a strange little tale spun off the idea of faux fortune telling women, which is where it started, but soon wandered off into the territory of strange dystopian communities. A flooded world and how women were forced into roles (I probably have Atwood heavy on the brain.) The fortune tellers had their own story and somehow the poems drew it out in my head, gave it a framework. It's a contrast to the last project that contained written elements, the science of impossible object, which while yes, there is a story to it , it was more lyrical in intent. I am especially considering these things as I work on my Hollywood starlet series and what will become my HH Holmes poems.
What is their stories, what is mine, and where do they connect and get the good sort of friction going?
