The title of this poem comes from one of the DSM's diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder—as I first encountered it in Susanna Kaysen's memoir "Girl, Interrupted," long before my own hospitalization at 22. Years later, while attempting to account for that period of instability, I was struck anew by the syntactic ambiguity and poetic potential of the modifier "real or imagined." In actual fact, the DSM phrasing, at least as far back as 1994, is simpler, and so misses the poetry: "Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment."
"I try to keep all versions of manuscripts just so I can see how the poems changed. And sometimes I will sort of Frankenstein old work into newer work, or take a poem that didn’t quite work and reach into it and lift a stanza, or even just a line. For example, the poem 'old confession & new' from Homie is really three older poems mashed together."
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"In difference to the traditional lyric model, where any 'inconsistencies' make the artwork suspect, Martell argues that it is these very rifts that open the poem up, throw the reader into a 'real' of artistic encounter. I would say that Olsson’s book is a 'rifted' lyric. It’s a lyric but it goes on too long, it confuses who is reader and who is writer, who is angel and who is human. It even confuses the angel with a dress worn as a teenager."
