10 This is the part about genre fluidity.
About my failure to provide a clear definition that distinguishes a poem from the short fiction, the essay, the play, or the novel.[1] About the challenges of delineating the precise borders of forms that exist in relation to their own porosity.
Marcel Proust recollected the madeleine of his childhood and fashioned a means of narration in relation to the remembered object. In Search of Lost Time provides such accurate portraits of the French bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and many of the characters can be traced back to Proust’s social circle, even though he changed the names. I don’t know how close one can get to the truth while still calling it a novel.
Did Proust take all these notes in his journals and then decide to move them around into a series of novels? Was he a novelist or a journalist first? Was Proust’s childhood diary when he began being this thing we call a “writer”?
I can’t isolate a single moment in time when all the things I wanted to say, or all the words desperate to formulate the ways the world touched me, were first delivered to a notebook. There are no memories of a self that wasn’t constantly torn between being present, or participating in human events, and being desperate to speak about the things no one talked about.
At seventeen, the experience of living was so sharp that words could barely hold it. What felt like a blizzard was merely the itch of my mother’s Transylvanian wool socks—the intensity of the itch tangled with her eyes, the color of glaciers, the pillow of her palm on my cheek. At seventeen, what tasted like fear was the panic of blood from a fresh-bitten lip, the grunt of car wheels over gravel, the fallen fruit of the blueberry shrubs staying busy.
At seventeen, the incorrigible appetite and hunger locked in tango. And the writer, watching from the bars of a trance; the writer, peering through the bars of a rhyme, like Romeo in a Dire Straits situation.
There are no memories of inhabiting this body before it apprenticed itself to this urge to find words for inexpressible things.
There is no “time” or temporality in which things were different, and no instant of not suspecting that physical touch was both appetite and hunger with no sated breath between—and there is no word for the distance. No clause for the insatiable. No rest, no finale, no ending, no closure: only the strange continuance, the ongoing-into.
The poem is a monstrous hunger. And hunger is my favorite part.
- Are you asking what the poem wants from its creator, or why the poem speaks as a poem rather than a prose piece? ↵