Hello lovelies! I hope you are keeping well. I'm prepping to record a reading and Q&A with students about my forthcoming book Windfalls and my writing process. I recently enjoyed seeing Kim Addonizio read at an online event for Cheltenham Poetry Festival and I have been revisiting her work. This chimed with me:
‘AS A WRITER occasionally tarred with the brush of being a “confessional poet,” feathered with disdain and once even tied to a maypole by roving bands of critics, I’d like to reveal a few transgressions to you here and now. I hope you will forgive me. I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life. This may be because I’m a woman, which means I am an emotional land mine waiting to be stepped on, a weeping, oversharing harpy whose inner weather fluctuates wildly. And women, as everyone knows, often lack that quality of imagination men have in such abundance.
‘In any case, I clearly have an inordinate, some might say excessive, need to kneel in a small dark space, separated from you by a little mesh screen, and reveal to you my impure thoughts and the number of times I dishonoured my parents or coveted my neighbour’s donkey. And now I must tell you how many times I have been guilty of lying my head off in my poems and just plain making shit up. Although I hope you will see that I have also told the God’s honest truth on occasion, because a writer must tell the truth at least some of the time, or who would ever want to listen to her bullshit?'
– Kim Addonizio, 'Pants on Fire', Bukowski in a Sundress
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