beautiful, sinister
As I've been working through my final edits on dark country, facebook reminded me this week was the eight year anniversary of beautiful, sinisters chapbook release from Maverick Duck Press. They are, by far, the oldest pieces in the book, the sort of series I was never sure would end up in a full-length because they were so much their own little story (luckily, I've written several, similar, sequences that all fit together like puzzle pieces now.) The earliest of them go way back to 2007 or so, since i'm pretty sure I was working on the beginning in the final throes of my MFA studies. I finally finished them in 2011, at a time when I was barely writing anything else.
As I've gotten them ready for the longer book, there were many changes, not so much in content or structure, but just in the prose. In punctuation. Last summer, shortly after lockdown eased and I was putting the book together, I spent some time retyping every poem in the series to fix the things that had bothered me in hindsight. I cut a couple segments. I cleaned up some p-o-v issues, holdovers from when the project was intended to be a longer one. At the time, it was definitely the most narrative I'd gotten, the most story-like thing I'd written until the shared properties of water and stars, which actually would be released the same summer, though it was written later.
The chapbook was a fragmented and circular tale of three sisters growing up in Wisconsin. A missing mother--violence and betrayal. A town that had been covered in a lake, but still pulled at its inhabitants. Later, I'd write with this narrative bent a lot, but it was still new to me then--and therefore more unwieldy. It also was written over years in which it had time to transform from one thing to another, to take on various names (the final title was a line from one of the last pieces I wrote.) I wasn't at all confident in what I was doing (some may say I never feel like that), yet people seemed to like the pieces--they were well published individually and Maverick Duck was the only place I sent it to as a whole.
What strikes me most is actually how I was being careful to be less "poetic" than I had been with my writing, which was a struggle and freedom all at once. Flash fiction writers and lyric essayists must have these same concerns. Is this prose that is more like a poem. Is it a poem that is more like prose? But shouldn't it be all the best things of both? And if so, what are those things? How is this different from things I wrote later--taurus? necessary violence? All things I've been mulling over as I put these pieces together and fashion them into a book.
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