Sometimes, if I am stuck as to where to begin, I start a poem as a letter. Sometimes it doesn't look at all like a letter, but in my mind, the means of address is the same. Sometimes, it winds up not being a letter at all in the end, or looking like one, but I have many projects that maintain the form throughout. One of my favorite earlier letter poems was part of at the hotel andromeda and was folded up in an envelope in the sheaf of postcards and sheets of paper holding other poems, and it's one of my favorite parts of that project. Later, I did a whole project of enveloped letters to the moon of all things. Another bunch of whimsical letters to a celebrity. More recently the plague letters. Letters between writers fascinate me--as do the letters of famous writers. I spend years in college reading and re-reading Plath's letters to her mother and others. They told lots of lies--more than her journals--but were more readable somehow.
In real life, I feel the letter is under-hyped. I used to write long letters by hand to friends and pen-pals across the sea in the decade before e-mail. I still have many of them, like a time capsule, in a box somewhere. In the early aughts, I had an entire relationship, which outside of maybe once monthly visits, was us writing back and forth steamy e-mails and dirty stories for the better part of four years. Later, when someone I was unwisely dating had some white collar legal problems and was in jail for 6 months, we wrote long letters I later had to throw out for my own sense of closure. More recently, how to write a love poem in a time of war was supposed to be like a love letter--a series of valentines in fact-- though the focus and format changed a bit to the finished version.
This week, I've been working on the unusual creatures letters- a one sided conversation between a woman and her sister. In the notebook I originally filled with words, it would have been a larger scope project, but when I re-imagined it last year, it was smaller and more focused. As I was editing them, I realized some of my better poems, in fact, take the forms of letters. There are several littered in the original version of errata. My fifth collection, major characters in minor films, opens with one of my favorites from the book "open letter to the muse." The imaginary daughter poems in feed are some of the best writing I feel I've done more recently and certainly one of the most delightful concepts behind a series.
This week, as I set out a new series, they feel a little more like spells than letters, though in some ways I imagine they are similar. I can't wait to see where they go...
