La Femme Derelict, Part One

I have been having a lot of back and forth fits of poetic consciousness lately based on the fact that I have been definitely moving somewhat between the personal experimental poem as "all poetry is autobiographical" into the"okay, I am now dealing with bits and pieces of my autobiographical life" experimental lyric poem. Just the other day, I was trawling literary magazines looking for someplace where my work would "fit in" and of course I ran into the "no confessional" tagline a few times. It does seem rather likely that some sorts of daily experiences are more likely to be experienced by people who don't have those experiences as "confessional." But I would like to think it possible to write a poem from a spirit of intellectual curiosity that explores just how mundane sometimes stigmatized experience is. Of course, you could substitute daily, normal, regular, any number of words for mundane. Anything to indicate this experience is part of a texture of a human being who has created a human speaker. If the speaker is human I guess. Part of why I have this all on my mind is that someone once told me that certain experiences are cliche among poets and therefore not worth writing them. To be fair, he was being sympathetic. The second part is that after writing poem after poem that was somewhat cagey about how/if it could lead back to the instances of the poet's (that's me) life, I sat down and wrote a 300 page autobiographical novel about some of the most intense experiences of my life. Response has been really positive so far, but still, there is an all new kind of terror there, not the least of which is to be thought self-involved. More on that later.