Jesse Scott Owen

I fool myself into believing in some magic in Forbidden Writing. And perhaps it is true.

I started writing Dead Girlfriend Songs after a break-up, but the break-up cannot be blamed entirely. I don't know, can give no account for the book, and how it came to be, and even now it is strange, there's a copy in my backpack, and I couldn't say how it got there, except it was written, and now it is there, in my backpack. This copy is either for a friend who helped me edit it, whenever I may see her, or another girl, who I am smitten with, who gave me a copy of her chapbook, whoever I see first, I will hand it to.

Even now I wonder if I should be saying all this.

A friend of mine, an established poet, a kind man, he read the lot of them, all the poems from which DGS originated, exactly 100 at the time (ugh, sentiment), far before their present state, and told me what was good, and what was bad, and which I could change or should cut, a kindness I'm not sure I could repay. But the first thing he said, when he read the 100 poems, he first asked me if I should perhaps seek professional help.

I told him, I laughed even, that I was okay, but thank you for your concern. The truth, I was unwell, when I wrote the poems, and the poems are the physical excrement of that pain. Any more, no, I don't deal with it. I left them in the book.

But still, he persuaded me to cut some poems, mean poems, not nice at all, one poem I loved in particular, the meanest poem of the hundred, I was persuaded to cut from the book. In other ways I remained self-destructive, leaving names unchanged, leaving a record of my pathetic attempts to make sense of past relationships, to try, and perhaps it would serve as some remedy, to make another person cry for us, as I was no longer able.

Compare, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets 196 says: “Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. ‘Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!’ Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Sei Shōnagon felt similarly: ‘Whatever people may think of my book,’ she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, ‘I still regret that it ever came to light.’ ”

Roger Shattuck, the great American critic of French literature, spent much of his life obsessed with forbidden knowledge; there is the one book, The Forbidden Experiment, about the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a boy pulled from savage solitude and coerced into living among people. The boy represented that Forbidden Experiment, something like the Truman Show, science that could be done, were we all just a bit more evil. Alas, the Enlightenment gave us both the science to do and the morals to not. Later, Shattuck wrote Forbidden Knowledge, and I haven't read it yet, but I believe it continues on the theme.

I have this idea of Forbidden Writing, what could be said if only I allowed myself, if I cared less for the feelings of others. Perhaps I am enthralled with the idea because it releases me, allows me to blame my lack on that which I am unable to write, I disallow myself from writing, and so cast myself both as brilliant and kind, without writing a word.

Perhaps that's all, perhaps I am enthralled.