Grammar in the real world

So, I got an email this week that was just incredibly hostile, a pointed personal attack written in a strange and strained, passive voice, 3rd person construction. In describing it to someone else, I jokingly referred to its construction as the “3rd person insultive” case. And I liked that—both because the humor relieved some of [...]

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Tell/Share/Overshare—when is the line crossed?

How do I talk about my own life while respecting the boundaries of others? What if, say, I wanted to write about a relationship with someone who is an abuse survivor, and the many things I might have learned from that? Do I have the right to share details of that person’s life in order [...]

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more on the ethics of first person/autobiographical poetry

from Stephen Dunn’s essay “Degrees of Fidelity” from After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography Poems [...] that involve or implicate family members should raise certain questions for those of us who write them. Why are we writing about this particular subject in the first place? Certainly we have the entire world of experience to draw from. [...]

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on the dangers of writing in “I”

from Carol Frost’s essay “Self-Pity” in After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography There are two reasons I have avoided the first-person pronoun. First, readers encountering the “I” may substitute an interest in the affairs and concerns of a presumably real person for the experience of the poem. Second, I may be unable to finesse the language, [...]

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Enhancing, Fudging, Protecting, Lying?

One of the big issues in writing autobiographical poetry is that, as a poet, I can rarely write only about myself. To write about and from my reality, I am inevitably writing about other people. And sometimes what I am saying about them is harsh, strong, and revealing. So, as a writer and as a [...]

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walking around the event

I don’t want to tell what is. I want to tell what is with all the radiations around it of what it could be. So it’s not simply a transcription of anything that actually happened but what actually happened, plus all the thoughts that one could think about it if one could walk around it, [...]

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