Small Containers
Holding Guilt in Writing
I have started a novel idea in three ways.
In one, my main character is middle-aged and observant of recent consequences. It is a southern beach-side fable, one with many men in love with him at once. The other takes place in the south, a city. The plot circles around resentment as it buds between a pair. The third novel is perhaps more experimental in effort and therefore, easier to write.
Novel Three shares the same themes as ideas one and two. The main shift is that the main character is trans/masculine and born in my hometown (self-insertion, sorry).
Writing the latter feels like cheating, since it is oh so enjoyable to do and also relatable to my lived experiences and current cynicisms. Regarding poetics, transitioning from the short form to the long is painful and unnatural. I don’t like novels as much as I like the stanza.
Last night, Jacob and I sat next to Eli. Over wine, I explained how in awe I was of Eli’s novel in progress. How fast he writes and how fun and witty. It took me over a year to write twenty-five poems that barely exceed 10 lines each. Poetry is a vice to which I refuse to quit. Writing poetry, overall, is as natural and necessary to me as exercise, kissing, or drinking water. But the novel is a new beast.
My longing for everything to become a poem creates an obligation that is, honestly, incompatible with the rest of my life. The joys of writing start to feel like a task, a tension, and then a chore. How I relate to the rest of the world after this is of guilt. That emotion is usually my final factor.
Guilt is just as easy to me as poetry, as living, as lovemaking. I know it well in the heat and in the moment, and then it's over. How do I choose writing if it only oscillates between a compulsion or obligation?
Like my novels, I never know what to devote myself to. Maybe this is ignorant to say, but it seems to me that to write a novel, there must be a laborious slog between page count, chapters, and scenes. I know this is a misconception, but to proceed with confidence feels foolish. But when I look back at my body of work, guilt is all over my poetry.
In my upcoming book, Pretty Punks (Magra Books), I express guilt towards gender, domesticity, and work in three distinct forms: poems, fables, and play.
In an early poem, titled, Spilt Milk, I reference a friendship ending. Was there anything I could have done different?
Every friendship has ruined me.
We have done what we thought
was an adequate performance
in leisure.
In the poem before it, FAGTHA INA N-AONAR, I move past a guilt by stretching:
My chest stays down
in a fetal pose with a furrowed chin.
My face stays down
on a scraped apartment floor.
My teeth stay down
chipping on surly, wood panels,
drool sliding across bedposts.
Several poems in Pretty Punks incorporate a Hiberno-English syntax, while some are Gaeilge (in B1 as I’m what I would call, an Irish learner).
When researching Gaeilge for this book, I was emotionally moved by many early Irish poems from the 17th century. Most poems are directly referenced from W.B. Yeats.
Studying Willian Butler Yeats has changed me in ways I had not expected, and I am very grateful for the ways language can be a tug of war between regular moments, suddenly folkloric scenes in the same stanza. Yeats was constantly referencing betrayal, and I really enjoyed adopting a selfish voice in my book.
Take this excerpt from my poem, How They Wanted Isles in the Water (from Yeats’ To An Isle in the Water, 1889).
How I kneedled you
and refurbished you
like a barbed wire rusted,
like an ocean fitting into one bottle.
My new poetry book comes out in December and after that, I’ll get to fiction writing. Maybe my novel will come to me in a less guilt-ridden place. For now, I am reading, and observing the writings of my loved ones. (Shoutout Logan Berry’s reading last night, Eli’s novel in-progress, and Jaco’s guitar playing at the house).
In a gorgeous discovery, I discovered Bernadette McCarthy the other day. Her poems took me for a ride and I was astounded. I’ll leave you with her poem, “After Mass,”:
