The disappointment of finding the book you were looking for in a second-hand bookstore.
*
* Rather than the book you would have stumbled on if the book you were looking
for hadn’t been there. The book you didn’t find, in other words, being
the book that would have changed your life, opened up the frozen sea within you,
etc. The one you did find, on the other hand, the one you remembered loving in your
twenties and which you woke up last week thinking about convinced you had accidently
plagiarized, even though you hadn’t thought about it in over twenty years,
well that book now strikes you as tedious and contrived and you are unlikely to
finish it even though it’s barely a hundred and fifty pages long. The good
news is that you did not plagiarize it. The scene that woke you in the night is
there, but it’s very different from the scene in your piece. You admit that
in some ways the book is much better written than anything you’ve written.
It’s a tour de force of sorts, no denying it. But what is the point of such
brilliance? Is the point of the book simply to be brilliant? Well, that’s
not such a bad thing. But the book annoys you. It annoys you quite a lot. And you
start to wonder what you were like in your twenties that this was a book you loved.
Books can move and inspire, but not this one. Your pieces actually have emotions
in them, that sort of thing. Maybe not this time, but often.
is co-editor of the online poetry journal The Maynard.
KYSO Flash is proud to be first to publish Hoadley’s work [i.e.,
the prose poem in this issue, “Disappointments (1)”]. His second
published piece, a flash play, is forthcoming in Word Riot.
