fragmentation and memoir
I've been spending a little more time with the thrifting memoir this past week with an hour dedicated at the top of the day, and I am finding my need for asymmetry and fragmentation at equal times unbearable and comforting. I feel, having read lots of personal essays of the lyric variety that their needs to be structure and sense making, which always feels very at odds with my poetry work. Those shorter bursts of brilliance or terribleness, but sustaining something over a longer page count feels unnatural and subject to so many more pitfalls.
Because, even like poetry, what is experience? And self? Isn't everything point of view rather than objective truth? Does it even exist. I wake up and the headlines are terrible and California is still on fire. The world makes no sense, so I am not sure you'd be able to create sense via words on a page of screen right now.
J and I talk often of Stephen King, and how his short novels are often the most satisfying to read, the longer ones, while they indulge the reader more, subject to going off the rails in the final third or so (I am thing of IT and maybe THE STAND.) The fervor with witch I once read FIRESTARTER or CARRIE for the first time as pre-teen, a much faster ride to the finish. And yet I did greatly enjoy the Kennedy assassination one more recently that was longer. Of course, the structure of a novel, especially horror, is by nature very different from non-fiction or memoir entirely.
Sometimes when I feel like I am trudging toward somewhere I just end up lost in the forest and am learning to stop before I get to that point. To either just remain there, or at the very least turn around and walk back to where I started. It's very different from poetry, but also a little exhausting.
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