A friend and I were recently discussing a possible funny zine project she wanted to do making fun of an ex, who we verbally make fun of quite often, but somehow committing it to print, she seemed to think, gave the relationship, a few years in the past, more weight than it was due. Or meant that she was still somehow processing it when to all outward appearances, one would think the appropriate thing would have been to have moved long past it to the point of not thinking about it at all. We'd like our exes to think we barely give them a passing thought, but probably think about them more than we should.
Artmaking adds another layer to the usual hijinks of harmless web stalking and mutual-friend casual recon sessions. No one will know when you get drunk and bemoan someone's less-fine traits at a party, but commit them to art and it becomes something else. (ask Taylor Swift). I've jogged around this in a number of ways with my own writing. In my first book, past relationships were re-mixed and combined with fiction. There was enough veiling and a shell game of sorts that I doubt anyone except maybe the people in involved could siphon out specific details pertaining to them (and maybe not even then), In many ways, this permeates the entire book--the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the friends--a mix up, a mash-up. Even myself, as a speaker, is a fractured, combined thing, with a not terribly unified voice.
The three books that followed were very much rooted in experiences mostly not mine. in the bird museum has a lot of persona poems (victorian women, Resurrection Mary, the Cornell box women "who love black shoes vodka" ) girl show has a cast of characters that are fictional based in research and the shared properties of water and stars is entirely fictional and fairytale-inspired. This might be why I was super self-conscious about major characters in minor films when it was released. It was the only book since my very first that plumbed real-life for poem fodder and much more so, and in ways not so entirely veiled and unreconizable. A little smudging and combining, sure, but people around me would know the players. salvage is similar, though it has some fictional parts like the ghost landscape poems, the mermaid poems are based in reality with a few details changed. little apocalypse, however, moves away from autobiography almost entirely. sex & violence, what is based on fact in there, is a bit of a departure since some of what happens in there is evidence of a relationship still kicking and not from as much distance, both temporal and emotionally.
Given the past relationships were mostly disastrous and unwise, I sometimes wonder if committing them to art makes them more than they are worth. While we go along, acting as if we do not care about the people that we hurt in the past or the people who hurt us, what happens when you use them for creative fodder (which probably has more to do with us than with them anyway.) I often wonder if it's a particular problem for poets--the condensing of personal experience within the work probably in a way that maybe only songwriters rival. And I guess memoirs, of course, would be the most hazardous of all when it comes to these things...
