totally true fictions
A couple months back, I sent the whole sprawling strangeness of the hunger palace to a lit journal as a single submission--classified as a lyric essay, and for the past couple of days have been working on some editor comments that might lead to publication, most of which I've incorporated, but it's definitely got me thinking about the different ways I would approach an essay vs. a series of poems. This project is kind of both, but it would totally depend on readerly expectations going in. If we say it is an essay, there is a certain amount of sense-making and temporal stability one would most likely demand. A series of prose poems, maybe not so much. So much as poets we might take at face value. A lot of extraneous imagery that might be cuttable.
I'm liking the process, and maybe in the end, it makes my essay better, stronger, but maybe also my poems, or that weird in-between territory I like to inhabit of late. It's also sort of strange, working more in the territory of autobiography than I usually do. The fact vs. fiction divide--the stuff we make up or change or adapt in the creation of art. I was about to make a change, to work a bit of one thematic thread into a paragraph and was like "whoa! wait, that didn't happen!" But really, does it matter? It could have? I actually have no proof that it did or did not.
When I was a kid, my mother loved to read "True Story" magazines on vacation. Stacks of them. I thought for sure most of the stories were entirely faked, though adult experience has told me maybe less than I thought. Did they exist today, I might have a couple of relationship doozies that would definitely have appealed to the readership ( (not on the level of Nazi wife, but still). I guess now we share such things on social media, or like me, masked as art.
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