As I mentioned in Part One of this series (sounds so official!), I am writing a lot of poems about interactions with men. Of course, I do not cite these persons by name, but I’m sure there are several who, if they read the book cover-to-cover, would recognize themselves in the pages.
This presents me with something I can’t call dilemma, but that is also not so simple. I’m writing very personal poems–not confessional poems–but poems that are almost all about myself and my life. And anyone familiar with celebrity biography, or in this case, personal poetry, knows that this can cause trouble once the manuscript becomes book.
What you don’t want to do is call people out or hurt their feelings. You don’t want to accuse. But what if some of these people deserve a “lyrical lashing” or two? Even then, you can’t just toss insults around. I wrote a line the other day that could be used in an author’s note, if I decided to include one: “This is about art–not revenge.” I’m not attempting a crusade against my childhood or adolescence, or trying to put anyone on poetry trial for being mean to me. That’s why a poem about a certain cruel one came out so terribly, even though I was no longer angry–because I was indicting him for What He Had Done to Me. Though there were nice moments, the poem was essentially inarticulate, and just, well…angry. As I’ve often said about spoken word, the reason it doesn’t work for me is because it’s more about the expression, or outpouring of emotion rather than the articulate, particular shaping of it. Anyone can get on stage and talk about their bad day or bad man; but who can shape that language into something really lovely?
So as I write these poems, that’s what I have in mind: that I can’t just talk about what went wrong, or how I felt; I have to really say something, and say it well.
If you’ve ever read more than one of my poems, you’ve surely caught on to the fact that I write almost exclusively about men. Men I know, men I love, men I almost loved, men on the street, men at bars, and men from school. More than one person has pointed out, however, that these poems whose subject is the opposite sex, are really meditations on myself, and my growth as a woman; and sometimes on my disenfranchisement and disillusionment.