I went to see the film Capote last Friday night. It was a haunting film. The whole next day I kept blurring in my mind between Truman Capote the real writer (not that I knew him personally or anything!) and the actor playing him in the film (who did an amazing job.)
It made me miss being a writer in new york. That city is a place of constant stimulus (no offense Cleveland). It also made me miss gin and tonics (until of course the end of the movie where the afternotes imply that he died from complications of alcholism). The main premise of the movie is that Capote was never able to deal with the fact that he essentialy used a horrific event, and the people involved in it, to write a great story. And something about that got under my skin.
I think as a poet, you always fear how much autobiography someone might read into your work. I know I rarely let my mother read my poetry for this very reason -- she'll read my poems vorasiously as if they were my diary. And my poems are anything but biographical. There are pieces of truth in there. But useally, those pieces are so mosiaced between what real and what's not, the real story would be tough to boil out of it.
