I've written before of the AWP panel discussion devoted to poets writing novels and novelists writing poems, and one novelists's assertion, to general agreement, that he always assumed the "I" of the poet was the actual poet--not a persona, not a work of trickery. In a workshop once, quabbling over a detail in a poem, someone once asked me, well, what was x or y in reality, as in what happened? in this real moment documented in the poem.? And seemed aghast when I said I did not know, that I had made the story up. That the story in the poem was entirely invented at all.
There was a great article from Cate Marvin I ready years ago:
"However, I find it obvious that the “I” of my poems, when I employ first-person, could never be me. The speaker of my poems couldn’t live in my world: she wouldn’t wake for work, she’d tell the neighbors to shut up, she’d be arrested for public indecency, she’d no doubt be locked up eventually. My life would be far too boring for her to stand for more than fifteen minutes. That’s not to say that her concerns aren’t my own, or that don’t see the inflection of my genes, the language of my dreams, imprinted in her every statement and action. But I can’t write poems without being assured that they will not be understood as autobiography. "
I've written before on the factual truth vs. the poet's truth and things get foggy between real life and poet life and the stories I make up to tell my own stories. The other day, I sent the FEED manuscript off to a press--I had been going to wait a bit, but I decided last week the book was ready and I might as well start sending that baby out in the world. There is so much of me in this book, more even than MAJOR CHARACTERS...which when it was published made me wholly self-conscious about how much I revealed of myself to the world. One day in the library, that book was on the new book shelf and one of the student workers discovered it and excitedly said they'd read it. And mostly I was uneasy--that people in my real life who I did not know so well just yet, might think they actually knew more about me than I carefully reveal. While I seem prepared to reveal any and all things to strangers and the internet, there is still a line between the personal and the public that seems hard to cross.
There is still the case of the how to write a love poem in a time of war, for example, whom the person they are actually about has not seen the entirety of. (though I suspect he knows they exist and has seen fragments of the project.) It's wholly embarassing that these poems exist unread, and the full-length book in which they are included will be released next year. The zine has been out over a year and sold quite a few copies. Yet I hold back somehow in the full reveal. Do not tip my hand entirely in the personal, one on one, relationship. Whenever lovers (or even ex-lovers sometimes), tell me me they have been reading my poems, or even this blog, I feel panicky. It's like shouting out a window, and being emboldened by the silence, and freaking out when someone hollers back.
As for FEED, I've talked about much within other contexts--my entry form the other day on body image issues. Some of the poems are too surrealistic obviously to be real. But even in those obviously made up things there are kernels of truth. The swallow section are the best at this..the girl /monster, who cuts off her fingers with kiddy scissors that remarkably grow back. But it's a poem about the body that keeps mutating and growing and cannot be hidden. And in that way, it's thesis is the same. The concerns are the same.
When I was just beginning to do readings on the regular way back in 2005, I invited my parents in for one at the Edgewater Library. I'd warned them, two people who had never really read a word of my work, that the people in the poems--the mothers, the fathers, the daughters and sisters, were not us. That I made things up. That they may have been combinations of truth and fiction. Or entirely fictions. And every time thereafter they heard me read, I would re-iterate this beforehand. And it was mostly true, every poems I write a mixture of true things and false facts, or true facts used to further other things entirely. I once wrote a poem called "fictions" (if you scroll a bit, you'll find it in this e-chap) that began with "All things considered, I am an excellent liar..." but then was one of the most-true poems about my mother I had written up til that point.
My sister has often said that the poems which sound most like me are the James Franco pieces, and this makes sense, much of that project was not composed as "POEMS" but as random ramblings, sort of like what I would do here. In fact, I remember combing this very blog for inspiration when writing them for turns of phrase and obsessions. In which case, I am most true in myself when not writing actual poetry with a capital P, and weirdly this, too, makes sense. The dropping of a veil. The presence of no veil at all.
Perhaps this is why so much of what I've been writing since FEED is enjoyable fictionalization--the stories I've been telling--taurus, ordinary planet, or even the second-person-ness of the zodiac poems, though you'd probably find threads of myself even there.
