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Should poetry tell the truth? “What is truth?” --Jesting Pilate, John 18:37 “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” --Emily Dickinson, Poem #1129 “Just the facts, ma’am.” --Sergeant Joe Friday, Dragnet Mark Strand recounts a conversation with his father. Here is part of it. Who did you sleep with? Who did you sleep with? Why did you lie to me? Why did you lie to me? Is this a lie, or is it the truth? Well, it’s not true that it’s a conversation with his father, because his father is dead. Unless, of course, you believe we can speak to the dead. I once listened to a radio interview with a medium, who talked about channeling people from beyond the grave. Interviewer: Who have you channeled? Medium: Lately I’ve been channeling Sal Mineo. Interviewer: Why on earth…? Medium: It’s surprisingly easy to channel minor celebrities. Nobody’s talking about them any more, and they really miss the limelight. But obviously, not every line in the poem is the truth a biographer would insist on. His father can’t have slept with a different woman every night, and also slept alone. So what’s the poem about? It’s about a son trying to know the unknowable—that is, the truth about his father. He starts by asking the wrong questions. Why is he asking his father who he slept with, and what insight does he expect to get from the answers? – and mostly, it is about the truth. We love the truth, but we’re not going to get to it, in poetry, by the same routes that a biographer, a historian or a journalist would take. And even if we could speak to the dead, there’s no guarantee that we’d have any better luck getting the truth out of them than Strand did with his imagined dead father. In that same interview with the medium that I quoted earlier, he said that spooky deserted mansions were the worst place to look for ghosts, because the whole reason for a spirit coming back to earth would be to be around people – which is why you find so many ghosts at places like the race track. “Could you get tips from them?” the host wondered. “Sure,” replied the medium. “But they wouldn’t be any good. Ghosts don’t know anything about playing the horses.” Athenian lawgiver Solon told us that “poets tell many lies,” and Plato went farther and called poetry “the Mother of all lies.” So it’s good to know that right from the cradle of civilization, the bar has been set so low for us. If we can up with even a little smidgen of the truth, we’re ahead of the game. But we live in an age of confessional poetry, and surely, if we’re confessing, shouldn’t we be confessing the truth? Anne Sexton really did have that abortion, didn’t she, and Robert Lowell really did share a prison exercise yard with Murder, Inc.’s Louis “Lepke” Buchalter? And he probably really did watch lovers and skunks in the moonlight. Else why write about them? And what about Diane Wakoski, dealing with the suicide of her brother after an incestuous incident? This was one of Wakoski’s first published poems, one of the cornerstones of her early reputation. When asked about the story behind it after readings, for many years she would avert her eyes, and mumble that it was too painful to talk about. Finally, however, she did admit that she had made the whole thing up. And, in fact, as we learn from the page I’ve linked to, her inspiration was not confession at all, but an exercise in developing a poem out of an anagram. Scandalous? Like those people who write self-lacerating tell-all memoirs, go on Oprah, and are then denounced as frauds? Not hardly. The point of a poem, whether it begins with something that really happened to you or an organization of words around the first letter in each line, is how it affects the reader. That is, ultimately, the truth that counts. This is somewhat less true in the short term. No one is denouncing Diane Wakoski about writing a grand guignol fiction about sex and death with an imaginary brother, but if Anne Sexton hadn’t been writing about a real abortion, it would have mattered a great deal to women who have had their own crises of conscience. But in another generation or two, it won’t. What will only matter is whether or not the poem resonates. And maybe it won’t. Maybe the factual truth, which can be so important to a contemporary or near-contemporary, will bog the poem down, and the reader of the future will say, “OK, this happened to her, but so what? It all happened before I was born.” Or maybe it will. Maybe the poem will have that truth told slant that comes from imagery and rhythm and a host of other things, that allow it to slip into the souls and consciousnesses of readers generations removed, and to continue to resonate. |