my life

So many poets who think their life stories are important.

life stories

Many people want to write poetry only if they’re allowed to tell their life stories.

near sighted

It was all close-to-home writing.

scenes from my life

Was that a book of poems or a verbal scrapbook of family vignettes?

intermittent narrator

The journal is only the form of memoir I can abide, being piecemeal, fragmentary, sequential only in fits & starts, like life.

sales and tales

The poet was a memoir monger.

noble sentences

He [Carl Sandburg] worked for ten years on the Lincoln book. I know that at the end there was a kind of desperation that something might come between himself and getting it done. You can understand if you knew the labor of it. For example, Lincoln was assassinated on a Friday night and he read 300 American sermons delivered the following Sunday—just to search into how the country felt. So you can see behind each sentence in that Lincoln book there was search, search, testing for accuracy and truth into the past then distilling all that chaotic ocean into clear, musical, noble sentences.

Another letter says: “I have reached 2 o’clock in afternoon of Lincoln’s last day…”

—Brenda Ueland, “Carl Sandburg,” Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings (Holy Cow! Press, 1993)

memoir broken into lines

Apparently you believe your narrative history merits my attention, but I come to poetry for more than memoir broken into lines.