by Ren Powell

I have always found it difficult to locate a comfortable place to position myself between respect and reverence when it comes to the “other.”

Surely it is a flaw in my character that I am not capable of honest reverence for anything created by human culture. But maybe it is a flaw in the character of all poets, the ability to empathize so often stretched to “identifying” with all the things we will never be: a horse, a tree, a cheese-grater … a Chinese miner. I doubt I am speaking only for myself when I talk of the poet’s (necessarily) narcissistic nature: We take on the voice that fascinates us, we work hard to find and express the “truth” we perceive within that voice, and we do the best we can.

I generally have no problem with this conceit. Which is not to say that it hasn’t caused problems for me.

This spring I attended a conference on “the other” in literature and spoke about my work with the Arab qasida, a pre-literate, pre-Islamic poetry form. I prefaced the talk by admitting I found the Arab language difficult to understand — even on the level of recognizing and reproducing “simple” sounds. My research was based on translations, the most responsible scholarship in the English language that I could find, and on interviews with Arab writers I know and respect.

The talk itself was about the narrative structure of the poem, the various literary devices that characterize it, why I was drawn to it, and what I (as a contemporary woman poet) felt was necessary to adapt when using the form as a model to express my own experience. When I finished and opened the floor for questions, one woman raised her hand and described my attitude as Orientalism*, which is one of the worst things anyone has ever said to me.

I didn’t handle the accusation gracefully. Reaching for a defense, I rattled and ranted about everything from theories regarding brain development in 2 year olds to toothpaste commercials. But there is no defense. I do not read Arabic and therefore have no primary sources. I have been inspired by the qasida through a degree (or two) of separation. And there is no denying that I speak from a position of social privilege in that I am a living and breathing white American graduate student.

So what does this mean? Must I spend the next decade studying classical Arabic well enough to read the 6th century poems before I can attempt to write a poem with the same formal structure and call it an American qasida? I have spent 17 years learning Norwegian and can tell you now with certainty that I could study Arabic for 30 years and would still not be able to completely appreciate the musicality or symbolism in the texts. Besides, when it comes to artistic appreciation, I believe that were I to thoroughly understand the “other” on his own terms — well, there would be no “intercultural” dialogue because I would have had to surrender the aesthetics governed by my own culture (and gender) in favor of the other. That isn’t artistic dialogue; it is a contribution to a series of monologues.

I had done my best to demonstrate the respect I had for the qasida and admit to my limited knowledge of the subject. However, I do not revere the qasida. I did not treat is as a sacred artifact from a foreign culture. I approached it with the same attitude that I would have had I chosen haiku or the pantoum. (I do not speak Japanese or Malayan either.) It is not that I am insensitive to the frustration of cultural stereotypes. (After all, I have been a “privileged white American in Europe” for many years.) On the contrary, I approached the research with an acute awareness of my own prejudices and narrow aesthetic and ethical viewpoints.

Still, no matter how I feel about my motives and intentions, my work with the Arab form is politically suspect. Two years of research has been relegated to a bullet point in a chapter heading in my dissertation. From an academic standpoint, this makes sense to me (considering the lack of primary sources), but as a poet I am feeling a bit disappointed. I thought I was doing something exciting, and now find I have been doing something I should perhaps feel ashamed of.

So, again: What does this mean? Is it really possible in today’s political climate to carry on intercultural dialogues through our poetry? Should everyone who writes and publishes haiku be expected to learn Japanese?

Do we seek out the influence of poets from other cultures? Allow ourselves to be influenced? Allow it and admit it and risk being accused of cultural stereotyping or colonialist tendencies? Allow it but keep it a secret and risk being accused of trying to pass off the ideas of another culture as one’s own?

Sometimes I feel the bigger my world gets, the more difficult it is to negotiate comfortably within it.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter …

* Orientalism has been described by one scholar as a combination of racism and sophistry in an attempt to make oneself appear to be an expert in a field, relying upon the ignorance of others in order to maintain an illusion of knowledge. Edward Said wrote Orientalism, an entire book about Eurocentric prejudice.

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.

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.