This weekend you will no doubt find me, headphones on, listening my way though TS's mammoth release, which I usually partake in bits rather than all at once to full process. The news on the web, however, is that it is much more about a short and heated relationship more than her big break up of a long relationship we all thought it might be (I would argue we already got that with Midnights.) I am not one to follow all the tabloid particulars and am more interested in the songwriting itself, but as I was scrolling social media and thinking about using writing/songwriting as a catharisis and a purging, I get it completely. The good relationships, or even the ones that just run their course, are not the ones that haunt you.
While there is art to be found in good and healthy relationships, there is just much less. Or maybe that happiness makes you need to purge less on the page. In almost 10 years, I have one short series and a handful of poems about my current relationship, the latter which are just mentioned in poems entirely about other things. Even the series that started as a Valentine became something else entirely. Compare that to another bad relationship that spun me for quite a while that cropped up in MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS and then again in SEX & VIOLENCE, at least in terms of specifics. While many of the men in my poems are amalgamations, that specific one gets mentioned more than others. Another relationship/situationship appears in SALVAGE, but not really anywhere else. An ex from the early aughts who recently kindly bought a copy of my recent book shows up in maybe two passing mentions in my entire body of work, though we knew each other and remained amicable afterward. Other men, including one, a work friendship one summer, I could have loved intensely had things been different, pop in and out amid the waves. Most men I dated, around a dozen over two decades, get a detail pilfered and Frankensteined onto other poetry storylines.
Last year, I wrote a series called "hotter" that was subtitled "a little book of ex-orcisms" because it felt like a purge, a release, and it sounds much like that's what TS was hoping TTPD would be. I don't know if it worked, because sometimes, when I am writing poems more tied to personal experience (rather than Persephone or Alice in Wonderland) picking at those scabs and fingering the scars is the easiest habit to fall into. And I can say pretty much I doubt any of my exes, even the one who remains a friend, reads things in this space. Besides that one who has always supported my writing, I don't think the other ones read my work at all, which is probably for the best.
Sometimes it makes me feel very foolish to think how little they probably think of me at all, and yet here I am, rearranging the ghosts dutifully whenever I write, even from a happy and content place in real life. The creative landscape is still a rocky and dark place even if the real life one is very different, even now when I am definitely writing more horror-focused work.
