by Ren Powell
We chuckle when the soap star tells the interviewer about being accosted in the supermarket by a crazed fan who wants to take revenge for the murder of “Aunt Toni,” the sweet twin sister of little Jean who had the sex change and then recovered from amnesia and remembered she really did prefer to pee standing up.
The vast majority of us know that actors aren’t the characters they play, and we know Stephen King is not a closet homicidal Satanist … or saint. The recent craze for memoirs that tempted both writers and publishers to try to pass fiction off as truth notwithstanding, we believe novelists, like actors, no matter how artistic they are, re-create the “other” for us. This is not necessarily so with poets.
When I was younger, I really wanted to be an actor because of all the different characters, the “others,” they get to be in a lifetime: 3D, breathing portraits of human beings in all their emotional, psychological, spiritual complexity. An actor’s job, it seemed to me at the time, was BEing. To BE a nurse for a while didn’t involve doing nursing things. (Later I learned an actor’s doing involved a lot of taking, as in direction, crap etc. — but that is beside the point.)
As a poet I am able to BE the other through the narrative multidimensional portraits I write. I am playacting. Then again, there is a reason poetry isn’t found in the fiction shelf. Jean Cocteau said, “A poet is a liar who always tells the truth.”
But clearly we only like our poets to be a certain kind of liar. Consider the case of Araki Yasusada, the Hiroshima-survivor poet who never existed. The fact is, a poet named Kent Johnson quietly published drafts of some of the Hiroshima poems as narrative poems (i.e., fiction), before “Yasusada” did. Before “Yasusada” was acclaimed as a remarkable discovery. The poems didn’t get better, but Yasusada did get extra points for authenticity.
With his fourth book, Sun Under Wood, Robert Hass published a draft of an earlier poem that now included details about his mother’s alcoholism.
He had written personal poetry before, but never something this personal. What would we think were Hass to come forward today and say that his mother had been a teetotaler? What if he had “corrected” the very first reviewer who had assumed his mother really had been an alcoholic?
I have published poems in which the speaker is a man; is dead; has a daughter; has a mental illness; has a twin sibling; has been raped; has been diagnosed with cancer; murders; prays to the Christian God … and I have rarely used subtitles or notes to identify the dramatic poems from the purely, “authentic” lyrical poems. It is rarely that simple. (And, honestly, I am not Robert Hass, so no one really cares.)
But in my second collection, an ex-boyfriend did recognize a quote in a line from a single poem that was from an email he’d written to me. He saw aspects of our relationship throughout the book and told his wife about it. The odd thing was that, beyond that single quote, nothing in the book was about our relationship. In fact, I wanted to call his wife, whom I have never met, to reassure her that the pregnancy and miscarriage described in the poem containing the quote never took place.
But where would I stop?
The whole idea of truth in poetry is messy for me. I wish I could say that I want the reader to assume it is all lies, but that would be lying. Part of me wants to call my brother and say, “Yeah, you know that line three of that poem was true, but do you realize that line 54 is the absolute truth I never told you?”
I am not one of those poets who writes for herself. I admit that some of what I write is driven by a need to confess, express or solicit what I otherwise couldn’t. At the same time, I have a fierce need for respect as an artist, not pity or commiseration over hard luck, so I want the reader to assume it is all lies and forgive me for the truth I furtively take comfort for when someone is emotionally moved by a poem.
As a reader of poetry, I assume it is all lies. At least I try to separate the speaker from the poet.
Today I am working on an interview about a new book by an acquaintance. I love this book. I know she has said that this book is “deeply personal” before. And now that I read and reread it, I find much of it centering around a stillbirth. I don’t know if it really happened. I probably won’t ask, because it doesn’t matter. The poems are so exquisite that the truth of their stillbirth is independent of the truth of a physical event. The poet has conveyed the pain and grief in such a way that I feel it. I recognize it as much as I am able to recognize the pain of another person. And I celebrate her for her ability to touch me (and I am assuming so many others) so deeply. She has broken through the “otherness.”
But for all my certainty in regard to my personal ars poetica, I know the objet d’arte is only one way of looking at poetry. And, in keeping with the spirit of Read Write Poem’s “poem,” I do believe that “to poem” can describe not only an act of craftsmanship, but also an act of communication. The reason we are angry with Kent Johnson is that the package of biography and poetry touched us is a way the poetry alone did not (and in a way the biography alone would not have). We gave away our precious emotional energy to comfort a liar. We were seduced by a con artist and feel dirty and a little concerned about socially transmitted diseases (like Political Correctness).
Participating in the whole-package kind of poem-ing is difficult for me. Poetry has always been an intensely private occupation for me. Readings that begin with, “I wrote this for my grandmother who passed away last week,” frighten me. (Obviously, I have intimacy and trust issues.) I know that it is wrong to listen to the grandmother poem as an objet d’arte — that would be like criticizing jazz for not being classical. But before I stumbled onto this online community, I never had teachers of that kind of art appreciation. Though I will always agree with the monster of a writing instructor in Storyteller * — that once you begin writing, it is all fiction — but at least I am learning to allow the facts of the other add depth to a poem.
Tell me: What do you think/assume/want in regard to the poet, the speaker of the poem and “the other”?
*Here is the link to the scene in which the creative writing student is hurt during a critique. She has written an autobiographical piece about the sexual encounter between herself and the instructor. Warning, this film is not for everyone. Very harsh language, and the satire may not be evident in the excerpted scene.
Ren Powell has published three poetry collections and eleven books of translations. She is a graduate adviser with Prescott College’s master of arts program and is pursuing a doctorate in creative writing at Lancaster University. Learn more at her website.
If I am writing a poem in which the narrator is referred to as “I”, I get very uncomfortable about stretching the truth much, unless the “I” is very clearly not myself eg from another time, place or gender. If I want to stretch the truth quite a bit in cases when the narrator might be mistaken for me, I tend to use “she”.
I know that not all poets bother with this distinction. A friend of mine commented to a well-known New Zealand poet after a reading, “I’m sorry about your father” to which he replied in some surprise, “oh, I made it all up”.
Thank you so much for this great essay! Over the years, I have struggled mightily with this “messy” issue. I have arrived at a working strategy which I can live with, but which I try very hard not to impose, self-righteously, on other poets. Here’s my strategy:
1) THANK GOODNESS for technology which allows me to post a memoir-or-fiction statement for poems I publish on my blog (a clarification not always permitted by editors of print magazines or books). I also admire one blog strategy taken by RWP’s own Dave Bonta, who attaches the tag “memoir” to his poems which are true for the “I”. Brilliant idea, Dave!
2) If I write a poem derived from true family experience, I get the consent of my husband or daughter or sisters to go public with it. Sometimes these poems include a combination of M/F. I discuss this artistic strategy with my daughter before arriving at consent.
3) Open mic situations are tricky. Once at an open mic, I began my reading with an explanation of the M/F ratio in my poems. Two later poets ridiculed me (by asserting, sarcastically, that they, too, had gotten consent for their poems). So now I’m hesitant to parse M/F at open mics. Also, such sermons take up the time of other readers’ sets. I hesitate also for fear I sound self-righteous, which I want to avoid.
4)I can’t be so disingenuous as to pretend that my memoir poems are all facts, or that my fiction poems are all fiction. Also, I ask myself: am I really disclosing all I could disclose about this poem?. There is, of course, an interplay (not only in poetry, but in real-life anecdotes, conversation, etc.) Rather than get tied up in knots about parsing the M/F distinctions, I now look at every single poem I write and decide, case-by-case, what the situational ethical concerns are and what I need to do to be at peace. This reliance on personal conscience, rather than a set of rules or other poets’ notions, has helped me a lot.
5) Once, a poet told me that I was too able an artist to “worry about” niggling concerns such as the ration of M/F. I disagree. I think that able, skillful, fine, or great poets are all the more responsible for dealing honestly with their readers/audiences. I consider myself a working poet, a daily laborer who makes something of use to consumers. I want my work to be as accountable as the work of a plumber or auto mechanic.
Great post, Ren!
I believe that by virtue of the nature of language we are already other to ourselves. That’s what makes writing so uncanny and liberating. It both is us and it’s not us at the same time. No matter how much we might want to say “I write.” Ultimately the truth is “it writes.”
Nevertheless we have to take full responsibility for what is written. It’s a difficult position.
An awesome essay, Ren. I did not know about the fake Japanese poet, but I find him, plus the fact that he would fake a person to publish this work, fascinating. Whether I would condone such a thing, I do not know. But still, fascinating.
I have donned persona masks multiple times in a poem — sometimes it is evident in the title or in the content of the poem itself, sometimes it is not. Right now, I’m working on a project where I’ve written some poetry in persona as John of Patmos, the Emperor Nero, Adele Florence Nicholson, Jim Morrison, and others. I am choosing dead people for obvious reasons. I’ve also written in persona as King David, Bathsheba, Jonathan, a disgruntled exterminator of strange creatures…the list goes on. Donning the mask does allow me to take a lot of liberty and have some fun. But in the end, it’s my name on the work as author. Where it comes from, though, I cannot say.
As for my own lyrical poems, sometimes I mix truth with fiction. In the age of the Internet, litigation, and so forth, I do this so that I don’t get my ass grilled or sued if someone recognises something in one of my poems. And because of this, I sometimes don another persona or create another character to speak my true feelings. And sometimes, the persona creates itself — I frequently write from a male voice, though I’m female.
But sometimes, I don’t care and it all comes out.
I have no problem “making up” things in autobiographical pieces. After all isn’t that “poetic license”?
Conversely, in some poems I do about other characters, I include very true and sometimes heart wrenching confessions..it makes those expressed feelings easier if they come not from me, but from the other “character”.
It is all part of the art of writing…
Note that the “Yasusada” case and the recent fictional “memoirs” were legally fraud, in that they were knowingly marketed as being something other than what they were. Most poets who mix truth and fiction (as Raven’s Wing writes above) don’t do so with the intent to deceive. I write some poetry that is personal, ie. expresses ideas or experiences that are important to me, but that may convey themselves through narratives of events that never “actually” happened. I write rather more poetry that has nothing to do with me. In many cases it’s not possible for a reader who doesn’t know me well to tell the difference, and I would actually prefer that they didn’t; I hope that the poem stands its own independent of what the reader does or doesn’t know about me.
It’s tricky, though. I assume when I’m writing from the POV of a dead person, a man, or a famous living person, that people will realize it’s fiction. But I’m sure there are people out there who think I’m claiming to be a “channeler”
i am always “the other” when i write poetry. yet, only a small percentage of poems i write could be strictly labeled “persona poems.” the narrator of a poem becomes someone i can move around in the imagined world of the poem. some days she may be 80 percent “the me” that people would recognize; other days 5 percent or less. i don’t worry about it. the narrator is always someone other than myself. the percentage of how “true” that narrator is to reality is 100. 100 percent the reality of that narrator, “the other,” in that moment.
it becomes funny when you think about trying to apply the same dilemma/standard to painters (while there are different “schools” of art, there’s not a conversation of truth vs. fiction). if art had to be accurate, all painters would have to be strict portrait artists or traditional landscape artists. there would be no room for frida kahlo or picasso or chagall or hundreds of others. it doesn’t matter to us how much of each painting was captured by their eyeballs and how much by their imaginations.
(i always LOVE this conversation. thanks, ren!)
I always write in persona to some degree. For me, by time the poem begins to form on paper, I’ve mostly lost track of what part of it is “me”; what fleeting impulse or passing emotion may have led to it’s inception. I love to make things up, and often as I write, my imagination takes over, and what may have started out from a personal experience is transformed into an story and filtered through the voice of a character that just sort of comes through me. It’s a very unconscious process, and I rarely have control over which voice or persona emerges. I can’t imagine ever writing straightforward, confessional, personal verse. It’s not the vulnerability aspect of it that stops me, but more of the feeling that I, personally, am not really all that facsinating. I’m much more interested in transforming my personal stuff in more widely expanded ideas, stories, verbal snapshots and collages than nattering on about myself and my mundane dramas. I do, however, really admire poets who do write intense, confessional verse and write it well. It’s some of my favorite sort of poetry to read; I’m just afraid that if I tried to write it, it would read like a fourteen-year-old’s diary.
I get that the video clip was satire, but if that’s even an inkling of what a writing workshop is like, ack! I’m not going anywhere near one!
I tell myself that once something, experience or idea, is down on paper, it’s a poem, and the details are as mutable as the punctuation. If it makes the thing more true to change the facts, so be it. With no given context, that’s how I try to read.
Still, as a novice, I’ve been disconcerted to find things I’ve written as fiction read as fact–and vice versa, and it makes me wonder how objective my reading is.
This is a great essay, Ren, thank you. I rather live (write) by the “rule” that what is best for the poem is best for the poem, whether it is true or not. Some poems have started as memoir and turned into something else – others that seem completely fictional probably contain more truth about me than the ones that are intentionally autobiographical. Just because poetry is an intimate type of writing doesn’t mean it is always personal.
Most of my drafts start with free writing or pieces of language that are appealing to me, and I build from there. I find that I often struggle to capture personal experiences in poems in their “real” state – partly because I wonder why anyone would care. Letting the craft of writing enter in and transform reality is part of what poets do.
Ren, this has gotten me thinking about my alter ego. I have one. I have more than one. Feldman the Robot is one of them, and I tell people that he has been writing my latest book. But duh. He’s a robot. It’s pretty clear that he didn’t really write the book.
I have another alter ego who is getting work published, not under my name but under the alter ego’s name. The editors know that it’s me, and I am the one signing the contracts, but the pseudonym will still stand when the work comes out.
I have this particular alter ego not because it’s better than me or has some dazzling history but for entirely different reasons, including seeing how far I can step into the character of someone other than myself.
There’s a pretty long tradition of writing under pseudonyms, and I wonder if you (or any other members) could speak to that, including talking about when it’s OK and when it’s fraudulent.
As a reader of poetry I assume most is true
as the truth is often so strange that not even the most fertile imagination could invent it. If I become elated by a piece of literature I dont care if Harry the Horse wrote it pretending to be a Japanese.If the work can stand on its own who cares?
Thank you all for the comments! I love this discussion. It can be really emotional for some people. I think I would feel upset if I expressed my condolences to a poet who then said something that amounted to, “ha, fooled you – that’s how good I am…”
Teil pointed out the legality of the Hiroshima-poet-who-wasn’t, but there have also been instances that were legal, but questionable in regard to ethics. There was a woman who was supposedly only 19 who wrote a film script – turned out she was 30 etc. It was a legal marketing ploy. Then that internet lonely girl video that went viral and turned out to be staged and scripted. . . and even the photo of the emaciated guy in Serbia behind barbed wire, that was published around the world- turned out it had been cropped and the whole picture showed that he only had to take a step to the right to walk around the barbed wire.
I am writing a series now in the voice of a 19c historical person and am making insinuations that might upset some people. Fortunately for me the woman has no living relatives, but still… I thought long and hard about how I would explain myself to her if I were to meet her in the hereafter. . . I think we sit with a huge ethical responsibility to our subjects and our readers both. I just don’t know where the line goes all the time. It sounds like it is something we are all thinking about.
I love the idea of creating pseudonyms! The robot author is a stroke of genius, I think… maybe I will do some reading up on the history of them.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
September 17th, 2009 at 9:41 am
I can say that I never do anything as a marketing ploy. In fact, I try to make myself — and my alter egos — as unappealing and unmarketable as possible. I hate the market and how it drives or at least influences almost everything we do during our waking hours and even in our sleep.
I had a whole bunch more that I wrote as part of this comment, but I felt it would make me far too unappealing and unmarketable were I to say it, so I used my handy delete button.
O! to edit perceptions of one’s self solely with the push of a button.
When I read a poet I want to hear the poet’s ‘true’ voice — I do not insist on precisely accurate ‘facts’. I want the poet to be genuine to him/her ’self’, without purposeful pretense or posturing. I want to hear what they have to say, not what they think they should say, or how they think they should say it — based on their consideration of other’s thoughts or expectations.
First of all, once something has been absorbed by the past, precise accuracy is already blurred — even if the poet is wholly focused on being precise. The human mind/memory from first instance of observing or relating anything, blends the individual’s perspective with the events taking place – so in first take, the observing or relating is ‘true’ only for that individual, and that truth morphs with the passing of time, as the evolving individual’s memory restores and then retells the given event, or their feelings about it.
Poet’s are not historians. They are a proactive, interpretive filter through which history passes, and upon whom the experience of that history has impact and leaves impressions. Give me a poet’s ‘true voice’ in the moment of time in which the poem is conceived — the rest is a matter of ever-changing perspective.
Incidentally, I don’t care if the poet pretends to be a robot, a red squirrel, or a sugar plum faerie – or goes by the name Bob, Ezmurelda, or the Mask Avenger of Brooklyn… I just want the poem to have a ‘true voice’ as I describe above.
rallentanda replied:
September 19th, 2009 at 10:47 am
My true voice says you’re a real scallywag Rob
LOL
cheers
Rall
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
September 20th, 2009 at 12:37 am
I like everything you are saying, Rob. Slightly off-topic response:
I had a very similar discussion with a poet that I’m friends with pertaining to flarf. He feels that flarf by its very nature can’t get at a poet’s true voice.
I disagreed, saying that when I use the same techniques as a flarfist in my own work — and I do from time to time — there’s still my decision-making involved about which texts to include, how to arrange them, how to make them add up to something in the end.
For me, when I use the method of flarf, there’s the sense of being a collector and recontextualizer of other people’s words and of those words acting like a Rorschach in a way. The words excavated, arranged and shared actually (I suspect) give me a way into my “self” — whatever that self or at least sense of self happens to be at any given time based on whatever my mind is set on identifying or aspiring to in terms of notions of selfhood, which always (for me) seems to be in flux. Hence playing with other people’s words seems to give me a point of entry into my own voice rather than allowing me to escape from or avoid that voice.
My friend argued that there can’t be any authenticity in flarf because flarfists themselves take a stance that denies that’s part of what they are doing — that they are intentionally trying to *not* be genuine with their poems. But when do we trust what humans say about their own motives and actions? Let alone what artists say about their own work? I mean, as poets were just about the most unreliable sources I can think of.
And besides, what one person or group might label as a joke or lighthearted or half-assed or even as a cynical approach might feel or be experienced as transformative by another person or group, even though methodically it’s exactly the same approach.
I know I sort of leapfrogged from your comment to flarf, but your words made me make an association, and I actually think the question is relevant to this discussion about self and other, since flarfists are very much steeped in the work of others: Other is, in fact, fundamental to how they build their poems.
Hi Rob- I understand what you are saying, but how do you feel about, say, a poet who writes a narrative collection about overcoming cancer or being raped. Who may have never actually experienced the situation first hand. We can never know the poet’s true motivations for such a thing – whether it would be a marketing ploy or a real, genuine feeling of compassion that motivated the voice that arrives on the page… how do you feel about that kind of “true voice”?
rallentanda replied:
September 19th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Does the experience need to be first hand for a ‘true voice’? I would say no in special circumstances.If you are very close to someone
you have special empathy.You could easily express e,g their pain in the third person but I would never do it in the first person.I would hope I could detect the difference between a genuine feeling of compassion from a cleverly crafted marketing ploy. Are poets really that
manipulative?
“Are poets really that manipulative?”
Well, I think pots are human and I am part misanthrope…
Great discussions here! I enjoyed reading this essay.
As a young poet I felt really connected to “truth,” and I felt that if I wrote about something as though I’d done it or it had happened to me, that I would be a liar or a fake.
As I got older and my life got more interesting I realized it’s a good thing not to worry about whether I’m fudging on facts in order to get to the truth of an idea, and more than that, yes, Ren, the point isn’t whether your poet friend indeed had a stillbirth. The point is whether the poems ring true at the level of sense and idea. When they do, then if the poet didn’t experience situation xyz he or she must have researched it or watched a friend go through it, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that when fiction writers do it, or else John Grisham has a lot of explaining to do.
At the same time, the poet I was ten years ago was trying to break through in slam poetry, and nothing made me more upset than seeing a poet adopt a voice, such as the single mother, and then play sympathy of the crowd for points, win, then have audience members come ask about her son when there was no son. The audience felt cheated, and I did, too. But I wouldn’t feel that way in a national writing contest because the audience and readerly expectations are so different, and if you’ve convinced me that something is true, then your poem succeeded whether it’s based in reality or not.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
September 20th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Good points, Cindy.
Ren, I dig what you’re saying; kep saying it.
I have been thinking about what you said, Rallentanda, about being able to tell if someone where genuine or creating marketing ploy… I don’t think I could. Actually, to be honest, I don’t believe anyone can. I don’t think that experience gives people magic powers over craftsmanship. For example, someone with cancer doesn’t suddenly know how to paint a moving painting if they couldn’t before. The same with the art of writing poetry. I think it takes practice and that lousy people write wonderful poetry sometimes.
Cindy, I think you hit it- the audience expectations. Maybe the poet has an ethical obligation to come clean when she knows the audience is expecting the poet to speak honestly as an individual.
I had never thought about it, but I just realized that I have listened to my Perdemo CD several times and never ever wondered if all the people and events were true. I couldn’t care less. But what if Ellen Bass suddenly spoke out and said she had no experience with sexual abuse – after legions of women have felt they had shared a kind of communion with her…
Maybe context is everything, every time? I have several poems about being motherless and several times I have seen calls for poems about losing ones mother (to death). Well, my mother didn’t die, she abandoned me- so even though I poems are right for the anthology from a certain point of view- I know the anthology, by the way the call went out, has an emotional, spiritual intention and I would be being fraudulent, in a strange way, were I to submit my poems.
I haven’t commented on everyone’s comments, but I am really intrigued by all of them. I am grateful for this venue, but how I wish we were sitting around a living room…
The idea of flarf is really interesting. It ties into the whole idea of the “death of the author” (someone send me a private message bringing that up) – and how some of us strongly reject the idea. It is really fascinating to read how you, Dana, think about sort of the epitome of a death of the artist technique like flarf while being true to Feminist hold of the significance of the author. Thanks for going OT there!