I is a lie (well it is round here, anyhow)

Exam time is icumen in, and many poor souls in schools up and down the country are wondering what to say to the examiners about poems, some of which are mine. This post is aimed at making sure they don't say some of the things I've recently heard people saying online.

I've blogged before about the perils of assuming that "the narrator" of a poem, especially one in the "I" voice, is the same person as "the poet", or that everything recorded in a work of art Actually Happened. A discussion I've lately been involved in on Facebook, though, makes it clear that some readers, even if they know it ain't necessarily so, think it should be; furthermore that they make a difference between novels and poems, at least lyric poems, in this regard. It's fine by these folk for novelists to make up a world; it may even be ok for writers of long narrative poems to do so, but there's a feeling that a lyric poem should come "from experience" (I have actually seen the phrase "from the heart" but am trying to forget it) and that if it's in the "I" voice the "I" should be the poet telling (heaven forbid) the truth about himself - whatever that is, and assuming he even knows it.

I don't know where this notion came from - the earliest real school of lyric poetry in Europe would surely have to be courtly love, which existed to celebrate purely imaginary love affairs - but it horrifies me quite a lot. For the record, when poets are minded to write about their personal experiences, they are very likely to distance the poem by putting it in the third person and making it happen to someone else, for the excellent reason that it avoids the danger of sentimentality. The most autobiographical poem Kipling ever wrote was the third-person "Merrow Down", which purports to be about a bereaved Neolithic father. By contrast The Changelings" (courtesy of Tim Kendall's blog "War Poets") is first-person and deals with experiences that weren't the poet's own at all; it's very much in persona.

I used to write poems in persona if I thought they might otherwise look too personal. These days I tend to third-person. But even if they do spring partly from my own experience, that is no reason to assume they won't also be adulterated with my reading, or other people's experiences, or, shocking as it may be to some, imagination... The fact is, poets are licensed liars; it's what we're good at and we can no more leave the facts of our own lives unembroidered and unimproved on than we can anything else. Nature is often a lousy writer; she gets details and endings wrong and frankly we can do better.

In a recent interview on this blog, my friend the poet Paul Henry described how he had excluded some of his best work from his Selected Poems because he was tired of seeing them read as autobiography. In the FB discussion I referred to earlier, someone said he felt "betrayed" on finding that a poem of Robin Robertson's in the "I" voice was not necessarily All True. Well, attend, O Best Beloveds in the AS-Level exam class, for I am about to utter a profundity: if you want The Truth, you go to the shelf in Waterstones marked Biography. (You still won't get it, but you will get something that aspires to it.) But if you're reading poems, and commenting on them in exams, remember that the "I" voice is correctly referred to as "the narrator". He/she is not, to your knowledge, "the poet", and there's no rule that says they should be.

Sheenagh Pugh

Hell

Hell is subjective, draining and personal.
Being afraid - of what?
Worry that you can't control.

Not knowing - unable to find out.
Regret - you didn't do better.

Realising the pain that you did not intend.

Waiting for the call that never comes.
Loneliness, whilst in a crowd.
Hell is personal.

© Penny Smale
All rights reserved

Hell

Through picture windows
there’s an enormous sky,
higgledy roofs, a proud steeple
and fine views over the hills.

I catch sight of you too,
on a summer morning,
waiting for me in the garden
with a fresh fruit salad breakfast.

Hell is not this gilded cage.
Hell is your absence.

© Sophia Roberts
All rights reserved

Hell

The dancing devil
in red and orange flames,
a nun saying hell is being
trapped in your
worst fear for eternity.

A carousel in my brain at 3 a.m.,
a million shards of misery
hang on a thin red wire
twirling round on a sulphurous loop.

A moment of fear becomes everlasting.

© Valerie Taylor
All rights reserved

The Fog

Deluding fog crawls through the senses,
Baffling sight and sound.
Illusions, like clowns,
Dance in cruel japery -
Shifting shapes inhabiting a wasteland
Where no future and no past can be discerned.
For this is hell -
Where only contorted images
Swirl, merge, reform,
In the meaningless meanderings
Of a broken mind.

© Gill Dunstan
All rights reserved

That Dark Place

Black blue hopeless subdued
Longing love alone
Deep ache dark pain
Lonely sleepless prone.

Flat drab joyless distressed
Leaden lonesome dread
Hope gone hollow song
Stealing feeling dread.

© Caroline Nicholson

All rights reserved

Hell is...

Hell is
Up to your neck
In Ess h One tee
All submerged in an inland sea
And the Devil's just learned
To water-ski

© William Botley

All rights reserved

Hell is...

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

9.25am. The headmaster slumped in his armchair. 

Yesterday’s Governors’ Meeting had been fractious, the Chairman requiring detail and evidence. Are all policies compliant? Show me that Mrs Fry’s dismissal followed procedure, exam results notwithstanding?

The phone shrilled; his secretary’s Mancunian whine announced that two welfare inspectors were in the office...

© Tim Scott
All rights reserved

Quashing The Inner Critic

Nobody has written better about how to silence our inner critics so we can get on with our work better than Anne Lamott. Her advice is not just for writers but anyone trying to create anything worthwhile.

“What I’ve learned to do,” she says, “When I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there’s the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?’

“And there’s the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there’s William Bur­roughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on.

“And there are also the dogs: let’s not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.

“Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar.

“Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head.

“Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want–won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often.

“Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you.

“Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.”

from Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Fully Immersed in Writing

To do your very best work as an artist . . . takes complete immersion in the work. You need to get caught in the slipstream, to drift along behind it as it carries you forward. You get into a state where, even when you’re not writing, everything you see, read, hear; every place you go; every newspaper you pick up; every conversation you chance to overhear feeds the work, because you are so saturated in it. . . .

Michael Chabon