Then our paid-up member of the awkward squad asked a taboo question: What made you write this? The poem made her feel very uncomfortable, manipulated, she said. She felt as though she were being exploited through sympathy to read something she would rather not. But if she knew that the poem came from personal experience rather than a gratuitous attempt to be sensational, she said, she'd feel less antagonised.
It was an uncomfortable moment. The general rule in our workshop is that the writer doesn't say anything until the crit is over, and anyway this sort of question is off-limits, but the questioner felt that this was an important factor in the analysis. The writer said with dignity that they'd rather just talk about the poem. The questioner wasn't very happy about this, or about the direction our discussion took.
Some of us spoke up for the poem to be taken on its own terms. If the poem were in a magazine, the reader could choose to stop reading as soon as she felt uncomfortable. (Anyway, since when has it been the job of poetry to let people feel comfortable?) In the workshop, she could excuse herself at any time. While it's perfectly OK, helpful even, for a workshop member to explain why they find a particular poem in bad taste, or even offensive, or why for them it misses its mark - it's not on to complain that the poem shouldn't have been written. It's one thing to suggest that a poem strikes the reader as second hand, or manipulative, or any other sort of fault, but quite another to question the bona fides of the poet. That's too personal.
So we got that sorted. In the end.
Sort of.
It leaves me with the perennial puzzle of biographical fog. Time and again I've come across poems in workshops and elsewhere read and misread and excused in the light of biographical knowledge: Oh, this must be about his divorce, or, it can't mean that because he's never had children/been to China. No, it's all about the words. Just read the words.
Well, one learns to be disciplined in reading. Je est un autre. We all know that. We aren't misled by the first person. Poets are fiction writers. To go to a poem in search of biographical truth is to make a category error. Poets will write what they are interested in. Notoriously, they adapt reality to their own ends. The poem has rights of its own, irrespective of any mere biographical happenstance. Yet poetry gets stuck with this authenticity rap more than any other genre. Readers don't quiz PD James about how many murders she's committed.
My introduction to formal criticism at school, years ago now, was I A Richards's Practical Criticism. Aeons ago, and it was ancient even then. His aim was to get students to read closely, just the words on the page, without knowing who'd written them or when. So much can be learned from the text alone. My teachers were disdainful of the baggage of biography, which was only so much tittle-tattle. But there's no escaping it, is there? Close reading is the beginning of reading, not the end. Borges had fun with the idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard rewrote Don Quixote word for word, in the same words, and the critic finds his version "much richer in allusion than Cervantes's 'original' work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602."
Quite so. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Or, consider these thought experiments:
Brian Turner (real name Briony) has never been in the Army, but writes copy for mail order catalogues.(Heck, if people can believe they faked the moon landing, they can believe anything.) The power of the writing makes the suggestions bizarre, but can we separate it from what we know of these poets' lives? Would we read the poems differently? Can we avoid asking why someone would write such poems? I've seen a reviewer describe those who write in the first person about second-hand tragedy as "the cockroaches of poetry". He didn't mean to liken them to archy but was suggesting that they hitch a ride on undeserved sympathy.
Sharon Olds is the nom de plume of Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity.
Wilfred Owen stayed at home, pruning his roses. He died in obscurity in a retirement home in 1984.
Heaney has an essay in Preoccupations (which I can't lay my hands on for the moment) where he describes urging his students to overcome their feelings of delicacy to crit Dulce Et Decorum Est. His students are reading the witness and, he suggests, prepared to let poetry off the hook. Does Owen overplay his hand? Is "coughing like hags", or "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" over-writing? Pressing buttons of sentimentality?
(It's tempting to sidetrack into the huge territory of war poetry and whether the poetry lies in the pity as Owen contentiously claimed, or whether it's more accurately the reader's sympathy that lies there. But this post, which is only a knee-jerk stab in the fog, would never get written.)
There is a suggestion that we tend to cut a bit of slack for the witness. A reader who finds she's been cutting slack for an impostor can feel cheated. On the one hand, if the poetry really is in the pity, the work has borne false witness. People who have been relying on whatever truth it purports to deliver feel cheated to discover it's just been pandering to the usual prejudices. Hence the common rage at debunked misery memoirs, marketed as autobiography. On the other is the argument that this can't apply to poetry; if the writing holds us, why should we mind that it isn't true?
Which brings me back to the workshop. The flip side of the coin is the workshop session that ignores, through professional detachment, the person who wrote the poem. If someone writes about despair, or dying, or a sick partner, is this something we should follow up on a personal level after the workshop? I recall reading a letter in The Rialto a while back where a poet complained of what she called insensitivity - her fellow workshoppers gave her a crit on the poem, but ignored the suffering human being who'd written it. I'm not so sure. It depends on the workshop, and the poet, their relationship with fellow members, and their general powers of ordinary communication. Workshops aren't therapy sessions. The poet who expects that is making a category error similar to the reader who expects biographical accuracy. Shouldn't we treat poems as separate entities, and poets as grown-ups who can ask us directly in conversation outside the workshop if they need to offload grief? In fact, isn't the poem sometimes precisely such a formal distancing mechanism for the poet?
And if so, where does that leave poems? Adrian Mitchell once said that he wrote poems because there were some things he could not say directly to the people he cared about.
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above, the vaulted sky.
John Clare
3 comments:
Interesting post.I am of the opinion that you bring a poem to a workshop to have feedback on whether this works well as a poem. The circumstances from which the poem might have arose is separate from the poem itself. However this is, I am aware, perhaps too cut and dried as how a poem makes the reader feel is part of the experience of words and the poem.That is not to say that I feel the need to either cross examine the poet themselves about their life and experiences or have to be convinced that anything that the poem leads me to think is either true or first-hand experience. If I am at a reading however and a poet tells me this is about something that actually happened to me then I am entitled to believe that the poems I hear are based on personal experience and that may , purely on a human level, lead me to experience a wider range of thoughts about the poem than I might have had if I either had no idea if this poem was factual or a poem based on an imagined experience. Of course all poetry is filtered through the personal experience of the poet even if the poem is about something completely fictional. We bring to words our own iconography and the emotional content of which words we choose may be part of our own emotional life. Likewise when we read a poem certain words may for the reader trigger a whole maelstrom of emotions. To ask the reader to look to the words only when reading a poem rather than taking into account their veracity as fact or their emotional truth as part of a heightened imaginative process is probably impossibly and maybe in some cases inadvisable but in a workshop should be aimed for. Saying that a poem makes me feel x or y is fine but demanding to know the source of the poem seems to show a need beyond what we need to know to offer constructive feedback on the work. Truth is a rum customer to wrestle with. I do not think it is airy fairy to talk about emotional truth, if a poem allows us to access something we feel as a valid truth for ourselves I have no problem about the credentials of its factual truth .
Thank you for these comments. I agree, the truth is a rum customer. We can be moved by work that we know is complete fiction (novels, film), and that's a huge subject in itself. It's rather the business of how real life interferes with reading and criticism that intrigued me at the workshop. Our workshop questioner, an experienced reader, was using the intentional fallacy, wanting to know the poet's reasons for writing in order to judge the work. (In fairness, perhaps the workshop is the one place you can do this legitimately: to say to the writer that to achieve this particular intended effect you need to consider X and Y. But that wasn't the case here.)
Reading is far more complex than just the words on the page, despite what New Criticism demanded of readers. It's the place to start, and IMO readers should stay on the page longer than they tend to. But hasn't New Criticism largely been discredited? Wasn't it based on assumptions of shared culture and privilege? Haven't things gone so far the other way, adducing biography and circumstance, that no-one in the academies evaluates anything any more? I digress.
The Heaney essay - I've found it now, in The Government of the Tongue - is "The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov's Cognac and a Knocker" (a Writeraoundy title if ever I saw one). He talks about the conflict between Art and Life, and the poet as witness. He suggests that Owen "seemed almost to obliterate the line between art and life: what we might call his sanctity is a field of force which deflects anything as privileged as literary criticism." He says "it seems like an impertinence when... we make pejorative critical remarks" about Owen's "excessively vehement" language. "[T]he artistic consideration, the need to call for verbal restraint, felt prissy and trivial when you considered what lay behind the words. Nevertheless..." because he was concerned not just with the testimony but also with the what was artistically goood, he felt it right to raise such questions. Though moved to tears today hearing about Harry Patch's funeral, I salute Heaney for that.
And I agree with you about readings. A poem can have many lives: in the notebook, in the workshop, in the magazine (where no-one knows you), in The Book, on the stage where you can give it a hefty leg-up, or out there in the world at large totally disconnected from the poet, on posters, on the radio read by act-ors, misquoted and even altered at will by people who treat it as public property. This has happened to Sheenagh Pugh's "Sometimes" and though she is understandably fed up, there is something rather impressive about a poem making its own way in the wild like that.
no-one in the academies evaluates anything any more
Of course that's not literally true, as Heaney shows in the following paragraph. Just in case anyone else is reading this.
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