Janet Jackson wrote:
>This is bloody good, Ken.
>
>I don't think you should delete the "asshole" bit, with its
>touch of surreal black humour.
>
>Writing as a specific other person - I have done it but never had
>the guts to put their name on it. Yet.
>
>One function of poetry is to express the inexpressible;
>to give words to those who have none. Go for it!
>
>Janet
>
>
I wrote as a woman once before, 1992. It was a catastrophe. I think
it's one of the few poems I ever wrote that I destroyed. I wrote
something else several years ago involving one of my aunts, who I placed
in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in March 1911, when it burned with
horrific loss of life. I don't know that she was there, but I gave her
"her" voice in the last section of the poem, and I don't think much of
what I did there, either--I felt like I was digging up a family grave
for my convenience. I didn't plan to write about Pvt England in her own
voice, the first version of this was in third person and was really
savage. Putting it in her mouth didn't soften it quite as much as it
made me try to imagine how she'd think. It just came to me the other
morning, do it in first person, not "Write like a woman."
Jury is still out on "asshole." What would Lynndie England think of
some white-hair old guy from New Jersey writing down her thoughts?--yet
appreciating for a second that he's doing so.
Ken, clueless in Princeton
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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