Been trying to chart any particular differences in the reaction to A2O. Nothing is 100%, there are exceptions to every rule, but women seem to like it more than men, or more completely than men. This is interesting to me because the speaker is supposed to be a man, and I myself never think of myself as particularly "gendered," so I wonder if I am unknowingly speaking in a particularly female voice. Or maybe I really am speaking in a male voice and all the women like it (the straight ones, at least) because I am talking crazy husky romantic man talk and the men are secretly and strangely jealous of my magnetic Byronic ways.
Nah.
Still, I have tried very much to make this book about how I think (as opposed to what I think). The method of my thoughts. Stripped as much as I can. Like I said before, it is hard for me not to dress and smooth the thoughts as I edit; to render them anodyne and unassailable. It is hard for me to be raw, and I am probably not all that raw even in the first instance.
Also trying to gauge the difference between poet reader and layperson readers. Some of the latter are far more intuitive and, well, seem to "get" it more. These poems are weird for me because usually I write on a very superficial, humorous, nonmusical level, and these are a conscious effort to write something more opaque, to purposefully obscure the story. It is hard to walk the line between too obscure and too open. Some people seem to be completely confused as to what the hell is going on; others seem to get it all too easily. I have had comments like, "you can stop dropping this hint, I got it twenty poems ago," paired with, "man, I am glad you kept repeating X; it took me until the very last poem to figure that out."
It is also a book of poems that works as a single poem; I feel like there aren't very many that work on their own. Reading one is like "what? bleh" and reading four or five is like, "mmm....yes yes yes."
At least I mostly like it now. A year ago, I could read it on Monday and declare myself a genius, and read it on Tuesday and declare myself an idiot. It is more focused now, and I am more or less okay with the whole. Resisting the overediting impulse. And happy again for all the help.
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