Palate-cleansing poetry post

     To get that icky Palin taste out of my mouth, I want to think about poetry for a second. Specifically, the self-revelatory nature of contemporary poetry. Some contemporary poetry. 

     OK, the poetry I've been writing.

     Truly, though, it's not my own personal bag (I don't think). There is a tendency as a reader to attribute facts, characteristics, situations, perceptions in a poem to the poet himself. Now, I know there are plenty of people who can't tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction, who assume that the fiction writer believes what his characters believe, has done what his characters do, misbehaves as his characters misbehave, etc. Those people are dolts. (Have I mentioned that one of the most delightfully solipsistic aspects of blogging is the ability to refer endlessly to one's own previous witticisms? Why, it's positively self-referential!) But poetry is understood generally to be self-referential; it is therefore revealing of the poet's deepest intimacies. 

     I've mentioned here (there I go again!) that I can't seem to write about anything but The Subject That Dare Not Speak Its Name. That's cancer to you. And yet, I'm in a poetry workshop with a bunch of strangers and an instructor so talented she makes my palms gooey (true, I have a bit of a girl-thang for her), and I'm supposed to let it all hang out? I don't think so. No. The reason I'm drawn to fiction is because I get to sidle up to the truth, crab-like, without having to spill the actual beans. And while there's more room on the page, perhaps, for a poem to be oblique (like, nearly indecipherable to a literalist like me) than there is for narrative prose, which demands clarity, there doesn't seem to be any way to fudge the intimate facts of my life in poetry.

     Maybe I just haven't found my metaphor yet. Or... could be I'm in so far over my head I'm coming out the other side. 

     At any rate, just want to go on the record here saying I feel uncomfortable turning in the pieces I've been writing, because they're all about... you know. My crush on Sarah Palin.