Am I still a hipster if I started the trend? Oh well...
Lara mentioned autobiography/backstory. Autobiography implies an amount of truth...my poetry is highly exaggerated at times. Example: Laura mentioned drug use in my poems. Yes there is some, but sometimes words come and they work and they're not factual. I'm not so much interested in the factual. 'Crack' served the purpose of going insane, 'needles' came out of a thought about tattoos, but the heroin reference worked and was okay with me. I left it. I didn't feel the need to tell everyone, no, I wasn't shooting up, because it was on the page as such and that's what I presented. Here's how I think of it. As much is on the page as needs be for the poem to work. Maybe more information, stronger links, etc. are needed to make the poem work so I divulge some personal information and maybe in return someone else, now with more info about the event, points out how the poem can function better on the page. Sometimes I'm asked about backstory and I don't answer--I dodge the question and if it doesn't work I flat out say that I don't want to answer it. Hmm, the only terms I can think to talk about this is to actually give backstory to my pieces and then show how its not relevant. Nepenthe--the restaurant, Sean and I had dinner there the night we suspect Taeo was conceived. The restaurant does tie in with the literary landscape I'm painting and the word has the other meanings that I'm alluding to, but the poem doesn't require such explicit info as a line saying..." We went to Nepenthe, a restaurant on the coast of Big Sur, ate roasted garlic and goat cheese on crostini and had a few pints. That night after we went home, we had sex and conceived our first-born son." Ugg. Boring. No matter the great language I could use to say this, nobody cares. In this case, I'd prefer to let the poem speak.
Lara mentioned autobiography/backstory. Autobiography implies an amount of truth...my poetry is highly exaggerated at times. Example: Laura mentioned drug use in my poems. Yes there is some, but sometimes words come and they work and they're not factual. I'm not so much interested in the factual. 'Crack' served the purpose of going insane, 'needles' came out of a thought about tattoos, but the heroin reference worked and was okay with me. I left it. I didn't feel the need to tell everyone, no, I wasn't shooting up, because it was on the page as such and that's what I presented. Here's how I think of it. As much is on the page as needs be for the poem to work. Maybe more information, stronger links, etc. are needed to make the poem work so I divulge some personal information and maybe in return someone else, now with more info about the event, points out how the poem can function better on the page. Sometimes I'm asked about backstory and I don't answer--I dodge the question and if it doesn't work I flat out say that I don't want to answer it. Hmm, the only terms I can think to talk about this is to actually give backstory to my pieces and then show how its not relevant. Nepenthe--the restaurant, Sean and I had dinner there the night we suspect Taeo was conceived. The restaurant does tie in with the literary landscape I'm painting and the word has the other meanings that I'm alluding to, but the poem doesn't require such explicit info as a line saying..." We went to Nepenthe, a restaurant on the coast of Big Sur, ate roasted garlic and goat cheese on crostini and had a few pints. That night after we went home, we had sex and conceived our first-born son." Ugg. Boring. No matter the great language I could use to say this, nobody cares. In this case, I'd prefer to let the poem speak.
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