SIX FRAGMENTS FOR ALANIS MORRISSETTE
Alanis, if you're out there, I mean it in the nicest possible way.
This has very little to do with Alanis Morrissette, really - just like the movie "Dogma!" It has more to do with the the way she was treated by the Newsweek writer, who clearly didn't fully understand or sympathize with her subject - just like the writers of the movie "Dogma!"
The point here is that a life of celebrity is still a real life, no matter how fakey you try to make it out to be. The format, if you didn't get it already, is an aping of Jim Carroll's "Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain," and I have the feeling that if I ever meet Mr. Carroll, assuming he's read this poem, he's gonna hit me. I had heard about Carroll's piece, and, as many were, I was immediately pre-critical of it. Not too much later I caught him reading it on one of those MTV spoken word things they used to have back in the early-mid 90's, and, damn. He nailed it, with one exception, and I'm not saying which line that was. It was a well done elegy, and a powerful grief piece, which managed to remain sincere and didn't get ghoulish. He has since ruined it, inspiring me to levels of ire heretofore unknown.
This piece, obviously, is a little more light hearted than Carroll's, which is only appropriate given that one is writing about a pop star who hasn't committed suicide, and the slight appeal to Carroll's "authority" is meant to set the tone of the poem as a good intentioned goof.
The dream of the lake with the tree growing out of it, incidentally, I actually had when I was 14. I had been through a couple of years of pretty intense religious seeking; I had been brought up atheist, and fairly suddenly it became extremely important to understand why people believed in God, and I thought that meant I had to figure out what God was. And then I had a dream - just an image, a lake with a tree growing out of the middle of it - and when I woke, it was like God had told me it was OK not to believe in what everyone else believes in. And I went "Oh. OK." In the poem, naturally, I didn't want to go into that much depth. I set the dream when I was 12 because it seems more evocative that way.