As I pointed out in these pages yesterday, almost anybody reading her poems on her blog might think these poems are written about him (or her). Certainly, her Brooklyn stalker did.
So, you have to wonder if maybe this is intentional on her part, stringing this small army of admires along, a kind of passive-aggressive provocation that keeps them intrigued when they are clearly no longer in favor.
She is an amazing talent, capable of crafting pieces that have multiple layers of meaning and can easily be mistaken to mean something other than what they really mean, metaphors that seem to say one thing, but really mean something completely different, and only a careful reading of each poem can steer a reader to the correct interpretation.
More than once, I have written something in these pages that I’ve had to take back after I went back and read her work again, a kind of literary slight-of-hand that often led me up the wrong path, from which I’ve had to retrace my steps to get onto the right one.
Maybe she’s just so close to her creation, she doesn’t understand how people might misinterpret.
I remember how upset she got last year when me and her Brooklyn stalker both got the meaning of one of her poems completely wrong.
As for knowing who she is aiming a poem at, it is even more difficult, and the only time I am absolutely certain she means me is when she quotes something I’ve written or said, and even then, most of the rest of the poem might not have anything to do with me at all. A few times, small parts of some poems seem directed at me, but I’m never really sure – although I’m positive none of her recent poems have anything to do with me, maybe nothing since October, her life has been that chaotic.
Most recently, she posted a poem that she claimed came from her archive, but which was so relevant to her current situation, you have to wonder if she was lying about it in order to protect herself against the inevitable disaster of dating a married man – what if his wife read the poem?
And you have to wonder if this use of the word “archive” is related to a number of poems I’ve posted that were older poems from my own archive. Did she think I was lying?
Many if not all of my contemporary poems have some relevance to her, although I do post old poems that seem relevant to current situations. So, maybe she dug up the old poem because it fit so well with the situation she is going through currently.
She clearly is at another turning point in her life, and apparently involved with someone she really cares about, and is frustrated by it all, questioning whether it is in her mind, and perhaps reading into the “few breathless encounters of a maddening kind.”
It apparently keeps her up at night, thinking about the almost too innocent relationship, the teenage sort,” which makes her all the more curious.
Is it a kind of cat and mouse, or is he really as innocent as she believes?
This is the kind of road that leads inevitably to heart break, and she knows it, too, knows that if she pursues what she wants most, it will do damage, and yet she seems unable to resist, drawn into it, less by what he says or does, but by her overthinking it.
All she wants is to be with the person about whom the poem is written about, someone long gone, regurgitated in contemporary times to have her face the same dilemma now. It is dangerous ground to tread on which makes me suspect she is lying about this poem being from archives. How can she possibly travel down this path before she realizes where it ultimately leads? If she’s been there before, felt the agony of a pervious engagement, why would she deliberately go there again?
I’m making a number of assumptions here – primarily that her poetry is an honest reflection of how she feels, and that there is a biographical reality to the poetic reality she invokes – both dangerous assumptions, although not nearly as dangerous (or as erroneous) as believing any of this has anything to do with me, an assumption I suspect her stalker from Brooklyn continues to make.
I’d like to think -- and this an assumption if not as dangerous – that she wants to be appreciated as an artist and writer, which is why she leaves open this door to her inner being, allowing readers access to some aspect of her without the distraction of a physical relationship.
But this, too, may be reading something into the situation that is not really there.
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