story, narrative, & the tools of a poet
I've spoken before of one of the most useful conversations (sadly, oh so few) in grad school about poetry and goals and intentions. How every person in the room had different aims with what they were doing with writing,. Or what they were specifically doing with THEIR writing. What they were reaching for or where they were trying to land. It was that moment I realized that my goals were vastly different as a poet, and, for a while it seemed, barely like a poet at all.
After we'd all gone around the room, the convo was cut short by having to get to the week' steadily uninspiring task of workshopping, but for a moment, things started to make sense. I, of course, had said to tell a story. Over the years, this has been a guiding force--equal parts mood, and narrative, and voice. It's probably why I love persona poems and always have. Why I tend to write about things outside my experience through my own lens and with my own obsessions in mind.
Of course, maybe its that I probably started out as a fiction writer. Well, if you count trying in vain to copy the stories and plotlines of the horror novels I was devouring in early adolescence. I was bad at it, of course. I would write on notebook paper and spiral notebooks by hand and plot out these intricate stories that I would abandon in the actual writing of. (while I have a fiction writer's spirit, I have a poet's attention span sadly.) I would abandon them and move onto the next thing. In college, my first workshop was in fiction, in which I wrote kind of boring "literary" stories, mostly about college students,..I never felt like they were the best, serviceable for the class, but hardly genius and proof of early talent.
Poetry sort of slipped in like a burglar and stole all my attention. Those early high school diary poems. Later, all the terrible skinny minimalistic verse and bad rhyming of my undergrad days. Unlike fiction, however, I was getting nominally good at it and would get better. By my mid-twenties, good enough to begin publishing and doing readings. When I return to fiction now, as I have often tried to, it feels less interesting. Like poetry has spoiled me for ordinary prose. My stories are good at their base, but the conveying of them through the language and structure seems lackluster.
I've been thinking over the past year or so about my love of stories and still feel like it guides me, apart from more lyrical forays every once in a while. Where they combine is perhaps where the magic happens. I've been thinking of it more like having the aim of a fiction writer with my work, but using the tools of the poet., the language, the meter, the metaphor. These feel like the best vehicle to get where your going, which I think is why my fiction always seems to be lacking some important thing that poetry always gives, but only the best kind of prose can. In truth, probably art works this way as well, a way of telling a story, be it collages, photos, or video.
When I look at the span of my work over the past two decades, there are definitely things that feel more novel-like. GIRL SHOW and SHARED PROPERTIES and GRANATA, while others feel more like assemblage of short stories in the form of poem series that hang together to form a whole. The latest manuscript, RUINPORN, is definitely this, as were projects like AUTOMAGIC and FEED.
In 2022, when I was first blessed with more time as freelancing allowed (well before I took on a lot of projects to not starve) I wrote the beginnings of what was to be a smutty novella called THE LOVERS. It's been sitting in google docs for two years, about 2/3 completed. I pull it out and look at it every once in a while, and while I can do smut very well, its the rest of the narrative that seems less inspiring. It occurred to me that it would make a much better series of poems, so maybe down the line, I should try dismantling it for that. There are other shorter horror stories you could probably say the same about, so we shall see. I've also been thinking about the poetic luxury offered by lyric and braided essays. There are many possibilities here that I am trying to harness for the thrifting memoir-ish thing I've finally begin looking at in more detail.
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