zodiac2 Apr 2004

Regarding the 'point', consider this: If I were such a drunken fuck-up as the narrator of this story, I probably wouldn't read poetry or have the self-awareness to recognize the narrator's situation as being like to my own (or to care if I did.) Ditto for you as writer. So this poem could mean nothing to an actual drunk living a boring self-destructive life; he would most likely not change his behavior in the slightest, even if he did happen to read it. Nor could it mean anything to me as a non-self-destructive non-boring reader, except to make me feel a little good and self-righteous about not being a boring drunk, which I don't really care for in a poem - and which is a false self-righteousness, anyway, since it's not a real drunk I'm feeling better than but a creation of your non-drunk imagination. A simple way to fix this is to position your actual self in the poem watching the drunk. Then you don't have to deal with the problem of the drunk's self-awareness and we can learn all kinds of interesting things about you which aren't fictional - that you're the kind of person who would write about a boring drunk, to say the least. And it would necessarily be true and believable.