one

from Bemsha Swing …

Some [poets] don’t really present a mimesis of the “self” at all …

my students and others who’ve stumbled onto my stuff at fyp and plainer are usually confused because they can’t figure out who’s talking … it doesn’t sound like the me they know … sometimes i ask, “who says anyone is talking?” or “can’t a poem be a kind of fiction?”

when i use the first person singular pronoun, it’s almost never “me” - this actual person sitting here typing when he should be doing somethng else to get ready for class tomorrow (no, you’ve done that … relax) … i’d call it a fictional strategy, if i thought that helped any … but the poems lack enough of the standard narrative markers for fiction that we just get more head-scratching … and the second and third person figures (and the objects that show up, too) have appeared more from what the language needs at that moment than from any effort to tell a story or represent myself (the hungry hole that passes for a self) … and it’s this oblique (not non-existent) relation to “the world” that keeps my poems … and me … in trouble … pretending