#1: On Baring My Whole Ass

How much of yourself should you share in your art, before you’re oversharing?

The second edition of my poetry zine I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them is yet to release, with three more poems, a new cover, and a couple of edits. The zine asks how we might navigate queer love – especially polyamorous love – following repression and trauma. 

When I showed the first edition to a new partner, they told me reading it felt like ‘cheating’ in the game of getting to know each other – like I had given them the passcodes to my heart before they could open their own.

Other friends reviewed the zine by questioning whether they were ‘allowed’ the insights inside, feeling as if they knew ‘too much’ after putting it down. 

And now I’m adding more to it!

Why?

In this zine, I use my emotional reality to connect with readers on topics of queer and polyamorous love, the effects of repression, and the effects of trauma. At no point do I explicitly recount a traumatic event, name the subject of any poem, or attempt to gossip. The parts of this zine which felt like ‘cheating’ to my loved ones, they said, were overwhelmingly the parts which included specific exploration of themes. By reading about my obsession with smooth marble statues in Make me a woman from ancient Rome, for example, a new partner could deduce that my unhealthy view of beauty and femininity had led me to skin-pick. By reading between the lines, my loved ones could piece together my past from my themes.

I am constantly asking myself whether this counts as oversharing. Recently, I decided to stop attending poetry events due to the increasing number of poets who would read explicit accounts of traumatic events without a trigger warning. Mostly, I didn’t want to spend $25 to have a panic attack. But the practice also offends my artistic brain; there is no aesthetic merit in screaming at the void.

Even without screaming at the void, personal poetry can veer far into one’s private life. While the endless line of open mic performers immortalising their latest breakups might just seem annoying, the popularity of celebrity poetry collections like Megan Fox’s Pretty Boys Are Poisonous tells us something more. In its prologue, Megan described the book as a therapeutic out-pouring of ‘desperation, longing, restlessness, rage and general anguish’. I could just re-iterate that screaming at the void holds no aesthetic merit, but this book didn’t serve an aesthetic purpose. It served a news purpose. It served as a source for celebrity news on Megan’s miscarriage and speculation on her relationships with Brian Austin Green and Machine Gun Kelly. This poetry was no longer poetry; it was cannon fodder. And though I couldn’t claim notoriety of any kind, I had to ask: would my poetry become cannon fodder for my social circle? At that point, would it still be valuable poetry?

The feedback I’ve received on I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them indicates that my emotional realities have at least helped some readers to better articulate an experience or specific feeling which they previously thought isolated them from others. It is not unique, it turns out, to fall in love with randoms. To idolise marble statues as if they’re fashion models. To forget how the act of love works. To tie your sense of self to a lover and feel it rot. 

But whether it seems ‘at once experimental and grounded in emotional reality’ to you, as it did to Sean West – or whether it’s just ‘too much’ – that’s not for me to decide. 

Tell me, reader! Did I overshare?

Word Count: 607