/ by Laura Kochman

Oh dear. This always seems to happen in the fall—things get busy, and I forget about this writing space. The visiting writers, whose visits I organize, started visiting right at the beginning of October. B spent a week in Belgium, so the cat and I spent a week cuddling. Ever since B got back, our apartment has been Sickville. The cat loves it, because all the humans are lying around so still and horizontal. I had a conversation with B about the poems I've been writing lately, and my frustration with suggestions to name people in them, to create more of a coherent sense of narrative. I know I'm not the first writer to use pronouns without announcing them [see: Kate Greenstreet, The Last 4 Things. see: C.D. Wright, in general.]. I want these figures to function as figures, human shapes, not delineated by their relationship to the speaker but by their existence as Other. And I can accept that it's currently not working, but I want to figure out how to make it work, rather than subscribe to narrative. My work of the past couple of years, the book manuscript and Future Skirt, has worked within narrative and character, and so it's not that I dislike narrative. It just doesn't feel right to me in the context of what I'm working on right now. My work of now is photographic, non-linear, flapping behind a screen. And I like it that way. And I'm very stubborn.