the bird girls return
One subject that obsesses me (and I should say seems to obsess me since I do not necessarily do it consciously) is the idea of transformation and monstrosity. In past projects, this has translated into projects about circus women, about Renaissance dog women, about Greek myths of sirens and daughters turned into deer. The last couple days of last week and over the weekend, I finished off the small sea-inspired series I had moved briskly through to something like a completion point at slightly more than a dozen poems and turned my hand and heart and head to something I had been playing with in my fauxtography experiments from last year that proved, or seemed likely to, provide fertile ground for poems. When the world seems slipping out from under my control, lately the writing seems to calm me (or at least give me something to look forward that is less an obligation or "work" in the usual sense and more a daily bout of play). So the past three days I've been exploring this new project and I'm liking the results so far.
While I have written about bird women before, most noticeably in IN THE BIRD MUSEUM and GIRL SHOW, this one feels a little spookier and more grotesque. I was actually using a poem from the latter, "the bird girl of jackson county" as inspiration when I started. There are many characters in my books that may deserve a similar revisit (esp. GIRL SHOW, though there is a little of that in EXOTICA.) People whose lives deserve a little more fleshing (or in this case, feathering out.) Why birds? I don't exactly know. But then, really, why anything? Lately I'm of the opinion that well-trodden ground is still sometimes the most fruitful if you learn where to look. But where those projects felt more whimsical or fantasy-laden, I want these to be a little more violent and body-horror-ish.
I'm also starting out with a little more of a fleshed out story and narrative arc, more than I usually do. These last few projects, and maybe in some ways all my projects, feel like short stories, just told in fragments or verse (which is hilarious since I am, on the whole, usually unimpressed by the actual short fiction writing exploits. Usually unless its a book length project, like GRANATA, my full-length hang several project together that have a similar thematic thread or at least related threads or ideas stringing them together. In that way, I suppose they are most like short story collections (usually around 5-7) than novels or traditional poetry collections as we know them. Sometimes these threads need a little teasing out and reorganizing, but they are there when I seek them out. Occasionally, I know, going in, what I am missing on a potential longer book project and make it happen with that goal in mind. Other times, it's a matter of picking and choosing. This, of course, also means there are a few stragglers out there just waiting for their moment.
Comments