TRUTH IN POETRY

I have to admit with some embarrassment that I don’t care for poetry written by a poet who is deeply sincere and earnest.  You know what I mean:  the poem that’s scribbled in a journal after a heavy date.  The poem by a poet who is determined to tell the honest truth.  Such poems often seem bad to me--didactic or naively confessional.  They usually ignore the possibilities in language.  They tend not to have anything to do with metaphor.  They generally ignore rhythm and sound and all the other special pleasures of poetry.
Once a poet shrugs off sincerity and starts playing a little, the poem usually gets better.  Play involves experimenting with sound and rhythm and figures of speech.  And I admit, the kind of play I mean involves departing from the simple truth.
I have a friend who is a magician.   He has told me that the way he does a trick is sometimes more astounding than the trick itself and in those cases he’s tempted to say to the audience, let me show you how this was done.   But he doesn’t tell anyone how he does his tricks.  A poem is in some ways an illusion, too, and anything a poet says about the process of writing an actual poem is probably suspect.  
Or maybe a better analogy is this.  A poem is like a tapestry.  When you turn it over and examine the backside, what you see is an incoherent mess.  Because I write hoping to discover and clarify things, I get nervous about revealing the mess.
     As far as I can tell, it was Wordsworth who, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, published in 1797, set poets, including me, on the path toward honesty.  Sincerity, Wordsworth called it.  His manifesto claimed that eighteenth century poetry was artificial.  He ripped into ornament and pretension.  He wanted to make something new and down to earth and terribly honest.
Wordsworth’s logic in arguing for sincerity is fascinating.  In the first book of his famous long poem, The Prelude, he casts around for a subject for his epic.  He remembers that a hundred and thirty years earlier Milton wrote an epic about paradise lost.  He himself considers an epic about King Arthur.  But why bother, he asks.  No one any more believes there was an actual King Arthur.  The public has lost its belief in almost everything and has very little in common.  Nothing grips them any more except personal experience.  So Wordsworth launches into a blow-by-blow of his life.   In The Prelude, for example, you can read about how, when he was a teenager, he stole a boat and sailed out onto a lake and how nature in all its vengeful fury rose up against him out there.
Ever since Wordsworth, artifice has had a bad name.  Poets have vied to become more and more honest.  I suppose I am no exception   But there’s a price to pay for being truthful, though that might not be immediately apparent.
I have a friend, a novelist who’s lived in Dublin all her life.  It’s a small world, Ireland, and she tells me that every time one of her novels comes out, the friends and family write and call and email saying How could you write about your mother like that?  Or your brother will never live this down!   She laughs about it.  But there is a kind of tyranny involved in taking people who never agreed to become part of a fiction or a poem and using them that way.   I was raised in a town of 900 people where gossip can mow a person down, and I worry a great deal about the damage I can cause by revealing what should be private.  
All the same, I confess that I like to be titillated by “honest” fiction and poetry as much as anyone else.  
Confessional poetry usually gives the impression that some terrible, raw need has dragged out of its speaker-- a truth which wouldn’t ordinarily be admitted John Berryman, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell--Titans of the last generation of poets--wrote confessional poetry.  They admitted to abused childhoods, to their terror of their own children, to their suicide attempts.  Most of what they wrote is biographical.  
But I think poets of my generation learned from their elders.  We have not, by and large, thank God, stuck our heads in ovens or leapt off bridges.  There is a kind of tragedy involved in what our elders did--living more and more harrowing lives because those lives were the subject of poems and poetry is a high stakes business.  If invention isn’t allowed and the audience comes to depend upon the voyeurism of autobiographical narrative, what can the poet do but live a life of increasingly reckless intensity?
But invention is allowed.  Many of the confessional poems written by poets of my
generation involve at least a little lying.   In fact, the (perhaps) awful truth is, poets of my
generation try to sound sincere while inventing almost everything.
Here is another poem which sounds confessional, but which is complicated by lies.

MISS LEONA GIFFORD'S HAIR
 
    Long before my father died
    we whispered how Miss Gifford was bald.
    That's why she wore her scarf  
    summer and winter, to hide her loss,
    we said.  I was thinking, the way my father’s shadow  
    hid mine.  Because after we buried my tall father
    he still cast a shadow, heaped up in his death,
    filling the four corners of the world   
    and whatever light the teachers tried to throw
    against my mind's wall--
    the good and holy beacons of history and science,    
    were blocked by the shadow of my father.
    When my friends felt its cold edges creep toward them
    they wouldn't touch me, they scattered  
    like magnets fleeing from another magnet.
    I sat alone at recess on the slatted bench.  
    One day Miss Gifford held out her thimble hand to me.
    I heard her say, Help me carry these books.  
    With my shadow hands I picked up her books
    and walked beside her to her office
    where she lifted their mortal weight from me.

    Oh sing, Muse, of how she turned  
    and stripped off the black cape that we said
    made her fly like Zorro,
    how she unlaced the black rowboats that we said
    made her skim across the River Styx,
    how she took off the wire-rims
    that made her eyes small as a pig's,
    how the blue eyes were wet,
    how she said, I'm sorry, Child,
    how she looked small and thin and trembled like a wet cat
    when she untied her scarf
    and shook out her blond hair like a gift  
    into the darkness.  

This poem is mainly invented, though when I wrote it, I experienced it so vividly that it seemed to be the truth.  One of the punishments for lying must be that you begin to believe your own lies.  But now, years after it was written,I believe I can separate out the truth from the lies.  Miss Gifford was one of my teachers, but she did not wear a scarf.  She was generous to me, but she never spoke directly to me about my father’s death.  I wasn’t even in her classroom the year my father died.  But she taught me during a year when my father was dreadfully ill, and once she gave me a look of such understanding that it was enough.  I made this poem out of that look.  By the way, another of my teachers, Miss Mierhenry, did wear scarves every day.

Here is another poem made partly from truth and partly from fiction:

           MAKING THE MOVE

We are sitting on the floor, sorting
your rock collection, sending the granite
back to the earth, the mica schist to the box
marked SAVE.   I love the geode.

Jack, I say, and mention its shine.   
You hold it in your palm, deciding.
Outside, it’s raining, proof that no sooner
do you get to know the sky than it moves on.  

Tomorrow the moving van arrives.  
Your father and I have signed the paper.  
This is the last day I will touch the door
where I turned so many times to feed you and met

myself, turning.  But your voice is changing.
You toss me a glance:  this nostalgia is prehistoric.
You turn the geode over.   What if we are nothing,
I wonder, but the walls and stones we choose

to keep around us? Jack!  I say, this time for
everything we dare not throw away.   
You have tossed The Odyssey to one side.   
Think of the man who never stopped moving

and called it twenty years of life.  
I am remembering the chapter where he talks
to his heart, how he says, Old Friend,
you who have gone everywhere with me,

when the testing comes, do not burst.
He knew how little he could carry
in his knapsack and still call it Home.
He would have kept this, I think,

the split geode, gleaming like a hundred amethysts.  
As you toss it in the throw-away box
I don’t move to save it,
the old stalwart rock, my heart, my heart.


Yes, we did move.  When my son was in ninth grade, I watched him make painful, inexplicable decisions about which of his things to keep and which to throw away.  I did not feel that I could make these decisions for him.  But watching him, I had the sense that everything I had taught him about values was up in the air.  Although he threw away many more significant things, Jack never actually tossed out his geode, or, in fact, anything from his rock collection.  The mass and heft of those rocks seemed significant to me at that time of change and I used Jack’s rock collection to focus the issue of loss for a parent who is allowing a child to make choices.  But strictly speaking, I have to admit, the poem is a lie.

I know the truth is important and honesty is a good thing.  Then how do I reconcile the fact that so many of my poems involve lies?  

When I start writing a poem, it’s too inchoate to be a matter of truth or falsehood.  I usually don’t even know where I am or what I’m writing about.  I write to find out.  Remember the creation story?  That’s what its like.  It’s chaos. God tries separating the light from the darkness.  He’s experimenting.  He stands back and looks at it.  It seems to work.  He likes it.  That’s good, he says.  

One of my friends who happens to be a priest told me what happened then.  An angel came up to god and complimented him.  So now that you’ve succeeded at separating the light from the dark, what are you going to do? she asked.  And God said, I don’t know.  I think I’ll just call it a day.

If a poet stands back and the words she’s written look good, she calls them a poem.  In spite of good old Wordsworth, a poem is less like a sworn statement in court and more like a magic trick or the creation.   If one word of a poem is rhythmically wrong, it may be more of a lie than if all its facts are invented.   If you talk about the truth of a poem, it seems to me, you have to be talking about its fidelity to how the world is in the largest, systematic sense.  

Several years ago I read a book about chaos theory, which, as you probably know, doesn’t bear out the notion of chaos at all, but rather the notion that the shapes of things in nature are repeated.  That is, a shoreline consists of repeated patterns, as do waves and leaves and many other natural things.  These patterns are not random, but orderly.  Surely poems participate in these patterns in complicated but perfectly comprehensible ways—ways which we talk about in poetry writing classes.  For me honesty has less to do with literal truth and more to do with that.  I don’t ask did I lie, but was I true to the pattern?  Is the poem shaped right?  

But what about historical facts?  Does a poem have a right to violate those?   I’ll tell you about one more lie.  This poem is supposed to be about ears, and Van Gogh, and listening.

VAN GOGH

   All right, I love him for the way
he painted Vermilion!  Orange!  jagged as
shouts, and when no one bought them,
                            no one even listened,
he shouted louder,
                     Sunflowers!  Self Portrait!
              and years later, not one sold,
                    he cut off his own ear.

                        Then he had to bring it back on canvas
         hundreds of times,
in the brass swelling  
of the bell
that called him to dinner,
in the complicated iris
    at the end of the Asylum path.
Think how stooping
at a fork in the road
he might have seen a stone-shaped ear,
           how the human heart,
             once it knows what it needs,
will find it everywhere, how
 in the curve of his delicately padded cell
              one starry night, he must have murmured
everything he had ever wanted to say
straight into the ear of God.


This poem was accepted happily by the Poetry Editor of a major religious periodical.  About six months later she sent it back, apologetically reporting that the Editor wanted the facts cleaned up.  I didn’t mind, since I had been uneasy about taking liberties with them.  She was sheepish because, as she told me, the facts mattered less than that sprit of the poem. .  

 Sir Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century claimed that a historian is "captived to the truth of a foolish world."  He is bound say what really happened.   In contrast, the poet, "disdaining to be tied to any such subjection," can select and invent episodes.  By such departures from the truth the poet can -–not always, in fact, does, but has the tools to—tell the truth at a level higher than history can.   This is a tricky notion, but one worth thinking about.

Excerpted from an address originally delivered at Trinity Arts Conference in Dallas,    Texas, Spring, 2001