It happens that the people in a poem are often in the audience at readings.
This seems to go with the turf. So my stepson Carlos gets to hear details
of his childhood related to a crowd of folks that he would just as soon
thought of him as an adult. His mother, who was very careful about
maintaining the wall between private and public, would sometimes find
herself listening to details of our sex life. She would be pissed-poff and
flatrtered at the same time.
When I was much younger I wrote a poem with the phrase in it "my mother's
estrous smell." My mother, who reads Wallace Stevens, said of the poem "I'm
sure it's very good, but I don't understand it." She navigates denial
better than most of us.
How do the rest of you deal with the others in your lives who never signed
the contract that allows us the freedom to publish their private lives?
Mark
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