Among the things that hold me back as a writer/poet (besides talent, practice, and perseverance) is this pesky adherence to or proximity to the truth. I suppose it’s a little more complicated than that… but in a nutshell, when I write a poem, the you or the he or the she tends to be based (at least loosely and sometimes not so loosely) on a specific you or he or she. The me, tends to be me or some version of me. Of course, that’s not always the case – except in the sense that everything we can imagine is necessarily a part of the self/mind. Perhaps more concisely, when I try to get at the heart of deeper feelings (love, loss, longing, etc.) they’re rooted in my understanding and experience of those feelings, and as such, the writing feels entirely too confessional. I don’t know if what I write reads as confessional (mostly because I never try to get what I write published or share it with anyone), but I’m afraid that to some members in the studio audience it will.
Gibberish. Try harder.
Tonight while scrolling through social media (bluesky), I came across the line “all the poems that I almost wrote were the ones I wanted you to read most” It was written by someone who went by the handle “rainy-reverie.” While on some level it resonated, I’d be hesitant to write a line like that. I think I’ve only written poems for two or three women in my life – to say such a thing (because it has hints of the truth in it) feels like I’d be outing myself. Moreover, to write such a thing publicly feels like I’d be setting a high bar for myself with whoever the next person is. It seems entirely reasonable for whoever enters into my life to want to be inspiring or worthy of a few lines of poetry… And suddenly, I feel the panic to get better at fictionalizing things – to throw the hounds off of my scent – (nervous laughter, sideways glance) oh that poem… it wasn’t really inspired by anyone, just a some shit I made up when I was bored and sitting at a coffee shop in Tuscaloosa. (See what I did there – I’ve never been to Tuscaloosa).
This, too, feels like it could be the heart of the poem. The false confessional in hopes of sharing a more honest confessional. The performative peeling away that we do through the years. Here, I might be thinking of a Stephen Dunn line that escapes me – something about being believable or credible gestures, or maybe it was this one, “I want you to know I believe / in the kind of transparency / that gets me what I want.” The point is, sometimes, I struggle to write because writing means going back to moments that resonated enough to leave an imprint, going back to the proximal spaces of feelings I once had. It means going back to events and trying to make them generic enough to be universal – yet knowing they were specific to a time and place. I very specifically remember an evening I had in a woman’s kitchen. We were cooking together. She was drinking white wine, I was drinking red. If I remember, I had to run to the supermarket to get an ingredient that we were missing. We were laughing and talking about music and things. As we sat at the table talking, she would tilt and roll the base of the wine glass on the table. The light in her kitchen made her eyes and the wine sparkle. I’m pretty sure I tried to write about it, to capture that moment. I’m pretty sure I felt guilty about enjoying that moment long after it (and the relationship) had passed. I have lots of those moments stored away – different people, different versions of me.
Of course, the more deeply I think about these things, I begin to wonder how much of this is a projection. How much of this is me trying to model a behavior I would hope to see? Why do I assume that some random next person might feel short-changed… unless what I’m really afraid of is feeling short-changed myself? Perhaps the more accurate statement at the top of the page is:
Among the things that hold me back as a writer/poet (besides talent, practice, and perseverance) is this pesky adherence to or proximity to the truth and my own discomfort with that proximity.