Poetry as fiction, poetry as lies

Post-script added 7 PM Saturday night.

I've always believed Shakespeare was making it up.

In his sonnets.

About the Dark Lady, about WH, about the bisexual love triangle, about riding a horse, about even having a horse to ride.

Made it all up.

There's more of his autobiography in A Midsummer Night's Dream than in My mistress's eyes.

And because I think he was inventing on every couplet, his sonnets strike me as essentially true.

When the questions How much of this really happened? and How close is what the poet says happened to what really happened? don't have to be asked, then naturally their possible answers don't pop up to complicate your enjoyment of a poem.  Poets are born liars and aren't known for worrying about getting their facts straight when a rhyme or a metaphor is at stake.  The answers to those questions are almost certainly Not much and Not very and once the lies are on the table it's hard to care about the poetry.

Back in Shakespeare's day it was assumed poets were making it up.  Even when the circumstances of a poem seemed to match the circumstances of the poet's life the poem's audience wasn't expected to think that the speaker of the poem and the poet were the same person.

Poets depended on readers making this distinction, particularly aristocratic readers with legal authority and whimsical ideas about freedom of the press, to keep themselves out of prison and away from the block.

In our time, poets are reflexively autobiographical.  If a poet writes a poem that sounds like a suicide note, the odds are good it is a suicide note, which is why Ted Hughes was racked with guilt over his wife's sticking her head in the oven until the day he died himself.

But in defense of Hughes and everybody else who read Sylvia Plath's last poems and missed the obvious clues, like I said, even when they're not supposed to be making it up poets tend to make it up anyway.  They can't help themselves.

I don't trust autobiographies of any kind.  They demand that we accept a preposterous premise---that the author remembers everything just the way they happened.

Nobody remembers anything.

They remember the last time they remembered something.

Try to remember what you were like when you were five.

You're making it up.

You're remembering what you are like now only picturing yourself shorter.

Louise Gluck is a good poet.  I like this poem, Snow.

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

But I only like it when I convince myself that she made it all up, that she made up this preternaturally insightful and resentful small child and the father the child thought didn't like to look at her or was too obtuse to know she needed to be looked at.

Naturally, I'm on the father's side here.  It's hard for me to imagine a non-acrophobic child who felt that riding on her father's shoulders was a form of punishment or a sign of neglect.  When my boys were small enough to ride on my shoulders they did a great deal of their traveling up there.  I'm pretty sure they liked it.  They used to ask to be lifted up.  I hope I wouldn't have put them up there if they hadn't enjoyed it, if it scared them or made them feel anxious or taken into custody in some way.  I liked to do it because they liked it.  But I also liked to do it because it made me feel strong and protective and in charge---made me feel like their father.  And I liked to do it because often it was the quickest way to get from one place to another.  It meant that I did not have to slow my pace to match theirs so they could keep up when I was in a hurry.   They might have guessed that.  I might have told them outright sometimes.  Maybe there were times when they weren't in a hurry that they resented being lifted up and plopped on my shoulders, trapped up there and unable to touch or smell or chase the things three and four year olds need to touch, smell, and chase in order to get to know the world.

Maybe they will write accusatory poems about it when they get old enough.

I just don't believe Gluck thought what she portrays herself as thinking when she was riding on her father's shoulders.

Those feelings aren't a child's.

They're the feelings of a bitter and depressive adolescent who thinks she can lay the blame for her own temperament on her father's aloofness, on his unwillingness to let her see him, on his forcing her to face an emotional emptiness when she was barely more than a baby.  She has made a metaphor out of a memory.

Nothing wrong with that, poetically, artistically.  If this was a scene from a short story or a movie it would be a wonderfully symbolic moment.   But is it a scene from a fiction or a scene from Gluck's real life?

If it's meant to be real, why should we trust that Gluck is remembering it correctly?  Why should we trust that there was an actual moment like that for her to remember?  People routinely fill their mental attics with false memories.  They unconsciously doctor the real memories that they do posses.

And how good a self-analyst is she anyway?  Why should be believe that her current gloom has a cause that reaches back to when she was a child and why should we just accept that she has correctly identified that cause?

I like the poem better when I think that it's made up.  When I suspect it's the truth---Gluck's version of the truth---it feels like a lie.

I think that Gluck has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to "remember" the past in ways that appeal to her vanity.  I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

She has a poem called Brown Circle that begins,

My mother
wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don't
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.

Once again Gluck is claiming that when she was a child she had feelings and insights into herself and the people around her that would have been remarkably precocious in a teenager and she is portraying herself vain about what a precociously bitter and perverse little girl she was and vain about her cold, stubborn, self-defensive self-centeredness now.

But I don't really know if Gluck is writing about herself or about a person like herself.

If she's expecting us to believe that this is the way she is, that this is what really happens, then her poems are a pack of lies.  But if she's making it up, if her poems are fiction, then I believe she is telling us the truth about life.

The poet and the juggler, a post-script brought on by some serendipitous afternoon reading.

This is critic and essayist Clive James writing about W.C. Fields:

Though he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place, one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home.

I read that and thought, That's Louise Gluck! Or that's how she presents herself as the speaker of her poems.  A person out of place.  A born exile.

W.C. Fields and Louise Gluck?  Kindred spirits?  Not so far-fetched.  In his essay, James makes the case the case that Fields was in his way a verbal and visual poet.  He says of Fields, but could be talking about Gluck, just as well:

For some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the key.

Could have come from an essay analyzing Gluck's poetry.  This is the last poem in one of her books.  It's called, as a sly joke, First Memory:

Long ago I was wounded, I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was---
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

A person out of place, a born exile, a poet, like W.C. Fields.

Snow, Brown Circle, and First Memory are from Gluck's book of poems, Ararat.

The essay on Fields is from James' new collection of essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts.

Comments

[Sorceress]

I think that poetry is a way of telling the truth by concealing certain things. You don't say black is black. I believe that every writer leaves a bit of what he thinks of himself in his writings. So while no one else can make out that he is a certain way, a certain fingerprint of emotion that is his is left in what he writes.

Sylvia Plath was definitely trying to let out some suppressed sentiments in her poetry. But was she maddened by what she wrote than the other way round? You've definitely left me thinking.

[Susie from Philly]

Dittos, Lance. The only truth is in fiction, and fiction is made out of lies.

[julia]

I dunno - Ted Hughes didn't get a lot better at noticing the signs when he knew what he was looking for, did he?

Makes a whole lot more sense if he wasn't looking.

[OutOfContext]

I really think this is the intellectual question of our time, if I may be so pompous. Evidence of physical reality is so malleable, especially in the visible arts now, that trusting the artist for reporting the facts becomes a fool's pursuit. Of course, for me it's all entertainment and I have a solipsistic view of art--it's all analogous to me. I've always looked for an internal consistency in a work,which is all that it takes for me to take it seriously, and then applied it to my own purposes--assimilated and converted into my own currency of thought. Perhaps that comes from being an inveterate skeptic and a nihilist at heart. It is the only way I can enjoy without reserve.

[Rana]

As someone who writes creative nonfiction, I think the concept that keeps me grounded is that of witnessing - that is, I am honor-bound to be as truthful in the big picture and as accurate in the details as I can. But creative (or literary) nonfiction is inherently different than a daily diary: like all documentaries, it's digested truth, written for a purpose.

Given that all our lives are wrapped up in storytelling - to ourselves, to others, about others, about ourselves - I think arguing that this makes poems fictional rather than nonfictional is somewhat beside the point. Nonfiction and fiction aren't absolute terms; they are relative ones.

What makes fiction different from nonfiction is the witnessing; there is a witness in the latter, a witness of events that did occur, of people and places that did or do exist. And even fiction is not pure imagination; the inspiration comes from somewhere, and the people and places and events depicted are held up against what the writers and readers know from their own experiences to see if they make sense.

But, yeah, about childhood as a source for writing. I can't accurately witness for much of my childhood, having been a child who was not a writer for the duration, and so I tend to avoid writing about it. (I've never liked, nor appreciated, the "write about your childhood" prompts they love to stuff into how-to-write books.)

[Rana]

I have to add, too, as a person whose creative nonfiction is not just memoir, but about witnessing place, and the nonhuman world, I get edgy about the notion that it can all be reduced down to human imagination.

Even if the "truths" I write are inherently human truths, that doesn't mean that the things I write about don't have an existence, and a right to exist, without my writing about them. Just because they come to you, the reader, through my human filter, doesn't mean that they are simply my creations. The writing, the filter, is - but the subjects are not.

[Kit Stolz]

I take your point about the truth of fiction, or in this case poetry, but "nobody remembers anything" is too broad. Of course we shape what we remember into stories, and commonly those stories overwhelm whatever it is that actually happened in our minds, so that we cannot remember the exact circumstances. But if nobody remembered anything, we wouldn't have those stories in the first place.

It strikes me that often really good storytellers also happen to have really good memories, and minds to match; cf., John Muir. Are there any other good examples we can think of?

[Matt]

Thanks for the Gluck poems. "Snow," which I've never read before, seems like a response to that most-anthologized of poems, Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz."

Which one offers a more damning portrait of the father? I'm having a hard time making a decision -- I'd say that Roethke's poem presents an image of the father that is both more damning and more redeeming than Gluck's poem. And both are great.