Yours is not (I regret to say) the story they tell / although you howl and gash yourself / scurrying out of the tombs
where you now live. / God forces some. / God’s prophet came
to send your unclean spirit / into pigs, who ran amok. / I saw you
at the bottom of the cliff of pity / diving in pig blood— / “cleansed” now.
“It was the time when everybody was writing a memoir, so of course I began writing a memoir. I’d thought about writing a novel but nobody was writing novels any more. Memoir was taking the novel’s place, everyone said. And sure enough, at our local bookstore all the memoirs had crowded the novels over to a single corner of the New Titles table. You could still see this one guy who thought he was writing a novel hunched over his laptop in the bookstore’s Starbucks, but he typed much harder than he had to and had a funny smell when you got close. I didn’t want to be that guy, so I started writing a memoir instead…”
Edmond Caldwell