Slanting the Truth: Memory & Illumination in Personal Narrative Poetry
By Maura Alia Badji
Written on the walls of a women’s bathroom at the McDowell writers’ colony are words close to these–”Our obligation is to outlive an insane family long enough to write about them.” Fueling my desire to survive my colorful and erratic family was a strong drive to be able to one day tell the Truth About What Really Happened. The Truth, not only about my experiences, but about all the people inhabiting those wonderful smoke-screened family secrets that led to more secrets. In my family, narrative was a snake that swallowed its tail before the story could be ended.
Surrounded, as I was, by inventive and duplicitous story-spinners, it seems natural that I would be drawn to experiential narrative, as a poet and as a reader. As a young poet I was interested in the Truth, my own and that of others, those who were brave enough to live to tell. I begged my grandparents for whatever shreds of memory and hazy recollection they were willing to dredge up. I wanted to know what happened in 1920-or-so, when Nana tangoed with Valentino on a ballroom floor as smooth and shiny as glass. What dress did she wear? What was the exact shade of her rouge? And was he really wearing some too? What happened, not many years later, when her Old World Italian parents forced her into an arranged marriage that resulted in the birth of ten children, of whom eight lived, including my mother? I wanted to know not just what happened, but most importantly how did she feel?
And what about great-aunt Connie’s daughter Rosalie, with the impossibly long black hair, who was kidnapped by the son of a Mafia don? Chloroformed, raped, and forced into marriage across state lines, she improbably fell in love with her captor, raised two children with him in a palatial home protected by blacked-out windows. When he tried to “go straight” his murder was pinned on Rosie, who spent two years in prison before the truth came to light and she was set free. Years later, she typed up her story on brittle leaves of rice paper and
put it into a shoe-box she gave to my grandmother for safe-keeping. Her story stayed buried in a closet until my mother briefly inherited it and let me read the crumbling pages; I’ve never fully forgiven her for impulsively giving this treasure to a distant relation without first making a copy for me. I tried to memorize that fragile manuscript– Rosalie had written her true story and I was interested in Truth.
I nagged my mother for her side of every family story and grew impatient when she “retold” history to suit her moody version of Truth. The stories my mother told often did not match those my grandmother gave me and vice versa. I noted the discrepancies only to shrug them off. They just hadn’t gotten the story right. I learned their stories so well it seemed that their memories became mine–but only after I had added my own touches. Raised in a chaotic, often violent household headed by a father who bent reality to suit his whims, I relied on the notion of Truth to finally set things right. As a young writer I planned for the day when I could tell the Truth about my experiences, my family, my far-off ancestors. I would write the Truth, turn my back on lies and be free.
Of course, I grew up and out of such simple notions; I found that more often than not ambiguity is the rule an adult and a writer must learn to live with. As I’ve learned during my apprenticeship as a poet and sentient being, the truth is rarely, if ever, one Truth. The truth is rarely only one story; the truth is rarely only my story. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve come to realize that the truth in life and the truth in art are not always the same thing.
In her Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck differentiates between the two by separating out actuality, “the world of the event”, from truth, which she refers to as “embodied vision, illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art”. She goes on to say:
The artist’s task, then, involves the transformation of the actual to the true. And the ability to achieve such transformations, especially in art which presumes to be subjective, depends on conscious willingness to distinguish truth from honesty or sincerity.(33)
So, in creating art from experience the poet must ask herself if “telling the truth”–being merely honest, or sincere is enough, or does it, in fact, keep her from reaching that which is true? The doggedly faithful recreation of what actually happened is of little use to Gluck, while the “embodied vision” is of great value. A voice that follows the path “discovery” is open to what may happen; no conclusions have been drawn, no lessons summed up and neatly parceled out for the reader. It is this quality of mobility that will keep the narrative alive; the immutability of fact leads to stasis.
I agree with Gluck’s contentions, but that agreement did not come easily. Like many poets whose impulse to write comes from deeply felt experience I thought that my first responsibility was to “get it right”, to be honest. I became frustrated when dramatic events recounted in a poem felt strangely lifeless and flat. Hadn’t I been faithful, at times painfully faithful to the truth? Yes, in fact so faithful that I gave up on a poem if I failed to photographically transcribe the events as they had happened. At times I felt imprisoned by what I took to be the “truth”; when I dared to stray from my quest for capturing reality, when I dared to invent I felt guilty!
By the time I read Gluck’s Proofs and Theories, I had begun to ask– How many versions of the truth are available to both writer and reader? Poet and writer Judith Ortiz Cofer, in an interview with Stephanie Gordon, relates how she learned about important facets of truth from both her mother, a story-teller who claimed she was telling ” the absolute truth, the la verdad“, but changed it each time “to suit the occasion and the audience” and from Virginia Woolf:
Cofer: She was teaching us that reality is relative, that we change it through our own interpretation… And I learned that was art. Art is taking the ordinary and trying to give it enough levels so that it becomes universal.
Gordon: …you say in writing the ensayos (essays of a life) in the book (Silent Dancing) you faced the possibility that the past is mainly a creation of the imagination….you tell of Woolf’s influence…how she realized the way one had to rely on a combination of memory, imagination and emotion that may or may not be the exact truth, but more poetic truth.
Cofer: …I decided to write these ensayos, which is Spanish for rehearsal or practice. I was rehearsing, using language as a trigger to lead me back to what Virginia Woolf calls moments of being, which are a combination of memory and imagination…So the actual event is not as important as the memory of it to me…(Gordon, 2)
As Louise Gluck notes, the truth “on the page, need not have been lived. It is instead, all that can be envisioned.” (Gluck, 45) It is not enough to simply recount or report events as in a personal journal entry or a journalist’s report. The weaving of actual events, memory, imagination, and personal opinion are at the heart of the art of writing experiential narrative.
William Zinsser describes the process of moving from personal experience to the art of memoir as “inventing the truth”:
…the writer of a memoir must become the editor of his or her own life, imposing a narrative pattern or an organizing idea on an unwieldy mass of half-remembered events. (Zinsser, 13)
In experiential narrative poetry, as in memoir, the events must be transformed through art–this is the goal of the poet using dramatic, or personal event as material from which to fashion a narrative. To be successful, the poet must filter events through not only perception but craft. In other words, technique plays a hand in the transformation of event into narrative poetry as much as emotional response to the material at hand. The poet must shape her material, point out patterns, reshuffle and select images, actions, details in a way that will serve the narrative
as presented to a reader. In some ways, created narrative must “make more sense” than reality.
Alberta Turner describes this editorial process, and the problems it may engender, in A FIELD Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.
The poet selects and points to its (experience’s) patterns so that they will be noticed.
If he is not skillful, his selection and pointing may garble the patterns by conflicting, oversimplifying, twisting or merely not making the necessary connections, thus distorting one self’s perception even of its own perceptions so that other selves cannot recognize mutual perceptions in it. It is this problem of presenting the data of one unique self so that other unique selves will recognize it as their own that poses the chief artistic challenge to contemporary poets who probe their own selves for the sake of transcending the individual in order to reveal the universal self. (162)
In becoming the editor of one’s own life in order to make art, the poet must not only transcend personal experience, but transform one’s memory of it, to the point where often what one has written becomes more vivid than what one first experienced. Poet Annie Dillard warns “if you prize your memories, don’t write a memoir”. (Zinsser, 14)
Experiential narrative, whether based on personal history or the re-telling of another’s
story, is wedded to memory. Memory, with its myriad twists, fragmented turns and switch-
backs is linked to the pursuit of truth. And truth, as Carolyn Forche has noted is “ambiguous
in that it requires very thick descriptions”, (Kuusisto,39) descriptions which we retrieve from memory. One’s own memories, and the memories of stories one has been told, inevitably become a part of one’s identity, part of the lens through which we view and decipher the world. Gloria Naylor has said of the writer’s use of memory and identity:
…[when] you think about the process itself, within the artist, what you are doing is trying to somehow give cohesion to the chaos that is all of you. You are taking the memory of your personal self, your historical self, your familial self [because] your writing filters through all those things. [A writer uses what] has been your living reality, consciously or unconsciously, and you articulate through that reality. (quoted in Pearlman & Henderson,23-24)
Because of the filtering process of memory and identity, a hundred writers will have a hundred different views of reality and none will have cornered the market on Truth; what they all offer is a version of truth.
It seems that for writers, truth and memory are always circling each other, waiting to see who will flinch first. More jealous cousins than adversaries, poetic truth and memory share many of the same impulses. Muriel Rukeyser speaks of an “imaginative truth” in her classic work, The Life of Poetry:
…there must be imaginative truth– truth which is health and strength and richness of imagination before poet or reader can approach the poem. If that truth exists, it finds its form, for the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same. If that truth exists, and we are not locked away in defenses and denials, we move toward it and it finds us. (55)
This imaginative/poetic truth seeks to hold, to keep, to gather, just as memory strives to retrieve the past and connect to the present. So, it would seem that imagination, poetic truth
and memory are bound together.
In her book Memory Quest: Trauma and The Search for Personal History, Elizabeth A. Waites discusses the retrieval of memory as a way of reinstating the past and planning for the future–
Information-processing models of memory typically conceptualize retrieval as an associational linkage between memory traces and cues (Tulving,1983)… the word retrieval brings to mind the image of a dog fetching a bone…this prosaic image may in fact be as relevant to what commonly takes place as the notion of a computer conducting matching processes. Intuitively…most people associate retrieval not with implicit or automatic connections but with intention and effort. We search until we find…we seek out cues that jog memory….What Jacoby calls the “stage-setting” function of memory enables us to use the past to plan for the future. (53-54)
While poetry drawn from experience may include an element of “retrieving” moments of time, it more importantly involves examining what was only to transform it. In so doing the poet is able to use memory to move from the actual experience to the “embodied vision” of the poem.
Charles Simic has said:
The secret wish of poetry is to stop time. The poet wants to retrieve a face, a mood, a cloud in the sky, a tree in the wind, and take a kind of mental photograph of that moment in which you as a reader recognize yourself. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we see ourselves.
(The Unemployed Fortune Teller, 2)
While I concur with Simic, I believe that in retrieving these lost moments the poet goes one step further than simply freezing time. As the poet looks at these moments through the prisms of imagination, vision, and craft, the raw material of memory is transformed into poetry. Of all the arts, I believe poetry and photography have the closest relation in how they use memory. Each form seeks to both isolate, illuminate, and transform specific details and moments, but in such a way that these details and moments continue to live in the readers’ or viewers’ imaginations. If the artist succeeds she will have a living, breathing specimen to share and not the dried husk of a butterfly pinned to a board. As Felix Pollak puts it ” A poem is/ to keep a now/ for then.” (Kuusisto, Tall, Weiss, 217)
In discussing memory, I mean not only the dictionary definition of “the store of things learned or retained from…activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall or recognition” (Mish, 725), but also the idea of memory as a living organism which shape-shifts with every occurrence, rather than developing in a straight line. An image that is quite useful in summoning the shape of memory is the spiral, an energized vortex connecting the present with all that has been and all that may yet be.
In her Introduction to The Spiral of Memory, a book of interviews with Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo, editor Laura Coltelli describes the power of transformation which informs Harjo’s work:
This same energy provides nourishment for memory, which strives to retrace the past not as an inducement to curl inwards on oneself, as if it were a point in time without an escape route, but rather as a dynamic process to reaffirm ancient heritages and proceed forward on a path of constant renewal:
The way I see remembering, just the nature of the word, had to do with going back. But I see it another way too. I see it as occurring, not just going back, but occurring right now, and also future occurrence… (15, Harjo)
…the proceeding of memory is the spinning movement of the vortex, which spirals down the tip while simultaneously expanding toward the future like the spiral in “Heartshed”: “in the beginning/ It doesn’t mean going backward./ Our bones are built of spirals.” (9)
Seen in this way, the spiralling vortex of memory becomes a dynamic conduit between our present lives, our ancestors and our futures. In fact, many cultures, including Native American, Chinese and some African, view the shape and function of memory and time in this way. Engaging the spiral of memory rather than struggling to draw straight lines between fragments of remembrance, in an attempt to get it “right”, can free the poet to “reinvent” the truth with all the tools she has at her disposal.
Craft and technique, in experiential narrative poetry, also encompass the poet’s voice. If the poet can recognize and develop her own voice she can gain more control over the poem. She can open her poems to the universal while also leaving her verbal “thumb-print” on it. The poet’s voice becomes her way of making the poem her own no matter the subject matter or point of view she employs.
In discussing the verbal image, which is a component of voice, Marlene Nourbese Philip states in her essay, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy”, that
Fundamental to any art form is the image… The word ‘image’ is being used here to convey… the irreducible essence– the i-mage– of creative writing; it can be likened to the DNA molecules at the heart of all life. The process of giving tangible form to this i-mage may be called i-maging, or the imagination…In her attempt to translate the i-mage into meaning and non-meaning, the writer has access to a variety of verbal techniques and methods…all of which aid her in this process. Whatever the name given to the technique or form, the function remains the same– that of enabling the artist to translate the i-mage into meaningful language for her audience. (Philip, 12)
I concur with Nourbese Philip, but would add that this is not the only function of “i-maging”– a secondary function is that of locating the writer within the work. This location is revealed through the interconnection of the poet’s voice, attitude, and tone within the poem. Lawrence Raab believes that “attitude is how the subject is presented, how in a poem the voice postures, therefore tone”. He goes on to state that attitude “emerges out of the poet’s attempts to write
his way toward that subject, to locate himself in relation to his materials”. (Raab, 19) How and where the poet locates herself is essential to whether the poem reaches the reader, whether it succeeds. I believe that, ideally, the poet must strive to position herself as a prism through which the narrative flows, rather than a mirror that merely reflects the poet’s experience.
The relationship between writer and reader sometimes parallels that of friends or lovers; a certain balance of expectation, desire and inspiration is involved. If the writer does her job fully, she will first set up expectations– by allowing room for the reader’s experience– which she will then fulfill within the narrative. If this is accomplished she will inspire a desire in the reader to think about her subject even more, to reach a deeper understanding. Alberta Turner, in A FIELD Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, states that most poets writing experiential narratives
…are working on the same assumption that has always underlain both the making of fictional characters and the telling of autobiography– that the universally common experiences created by human psychology, physiology, and history insure that any cluster of specific, concrete details in any single human being’s experience can be made to evoke similar responses from all human beings. (161)
The stress she gives to the words “can be made” point to the significance of technique and craft in shaping personal/experiential material in such a way as to transcend the merely personal and move into the universal. Turner sees this as “the chief artistic challenge of contemporary poets” who work in this mode. If one succeeds at this difficult task Turner believes the reader will say ” ‘Look how interesting I am’. And the poem which makes a reader say that is a poem he’ll keep.” (170) What is not compelling, is not kept; what is not kept certainly won’t endure.
In describing the lure that compelling literature, and the memoir in particular holds for readers, fiction writer Joan Frank finds that these works:
…seem at once to be happening within us and to us; another’s life slipped momentarily over our own, an imposed yet familiar dream. How? By attaching reader identification to recognizable thoughts, emotions, actions, or events–segueing from known to unknown, concatenating belief through successive experiences like stitches through knitting….As the writers perceptions seep into ours, so do their revelations and sorrows. (Frank, 17)
Frank’s assessment that the “artful” memoirist is a skilled weaver who allows their perceptions of experience to gradually “seep” into the readers’ can also be applied to the poet who successfully spins experiential narrative.
The poet who stands between the reader and the poem, blocks the reader’s view by asserting the primacy of her experience, her vision; this poet runs the risk of becoming the literary equivalent of the companion who talks of nothing but herself. The poet who invites the reader along for the ride, makes space for the reader’s associations, emotions, reactions.
The extreme versions of these two positioning choices fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end, we find the poet who strives for objectivity to the point of disappearing. For example, much of Carolyn Forche’s earlier work is characterized by a dislocation of the poet’s voice. She reports on what she witnesses in other cultures and often locates herself as a “spokesperson” for the truth as experienced by others. Where is her experience? In the least successful of her poems Forche positions herself as a mouth-piece for some politically correct notion of truth, divorced from the heat and immediacy of her own human experience. The following passage from “Return”, included in her The Country Between Us, is illustrative of this dislocated stance; a great deal of the poem is given over to the voice of Josephine, to whom the poem is dedicated:
So you know
now, you said, what kind of money
is involved and that campesinos knife
one another and you know you should
not trust anyone and so find a few
people you will trust. You know the mix
of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue
that costs hundreds of deaths…
…Such things as water pumps
and co-op farms are of little importance
and take years.
It is not Che Guevera, this struggle.
Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara
was rounded up with the others, and Jose’
Marti’ is a landing strip for planes
from Miami to Cuba. Go try on
Americans your long, dull story
The authoritative voice comes from Josephine, who reports what the author witnessed, and then proceeds to give the author and the reader a sort of moralistic Latin American history lesson. The authenticity of the experience, as delivered by Josephine, is “suspect”; she is re-reporting what the author has shared with her, so the experience is twice removed. How can her readers trust her when she does not entrust them with her own perception? While I will not go so far as to say the technique of first-person restatement of second-person experience equals a failure of “embodied vision”, I do believe that this makes for a weaker poem. In the best of her work we find her midway between subject, experience, and witness as in “The Colonel”, also from The Country Between Us:
The Colonel
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it in a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves.
He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine
in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears
on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor
were pressed to the ground.
May 1978
In this poem, Forche’ starkly relates the tension and horror of her particular experience in such a way that it is transformed into something familiar to the reader. The passage way between subject and reader is left free. In removing herself as the focus of the event while still staying present, she makes certain assumptions that the reader will recognize flashes of specific details and will follow her into the poem.
At the other, far end of the location spectrum we find the poet who not only blocks the reader’s experience, but places himself front, center, and omnipresent. The world is not so much strained through his experience as drowned by it. Sharon Olds’s poem “The Takers” from her second book The Dead and The Living is an example of such a poem:
Hitler entered Paris the way my
sister entered my room at night,
sat astride me, squeezed me with her knees,
held her thumbnails to the skin of my wrists and
peed on me, knowing Mother would
never believe my story. It was very
silent, her dim face above me
gleaming in the shadows, the dark gold
smell of her urine spreading through the room, its
heat boiling on my legs, my small
pelvis wet. When the hissing stopped, when the
hole had been scorched in my body, I lay
crisp and charred with shame and felt her
skin glitter in the air, her dark
gold pleasure unfold as he stood over
Napoleon’s tomb and murmured This is the
finest moment of my life.
This is not so much a poem, as an accounting, or as Carol Muske puts it– “testimony…(which) lacks any noticeable rhythmic pattern beyond the flat conversational tone of the speaker.” (Muske, 17) The poet seems to be recounting facts with very little art involved beyond the regrettable and “uneasy appropriation of the Nazi/victim paradigm”.(18) The metaphoric leap from the older sister’s actions to those of Hitler is just too far a leap to ask of the reader. Such an appropriation is symptomatic of the kind of hubris which can occur when the poet is located in such a way as to block all other sensibilities. The poet does not allow the material to move from actuality to “embodied vision”; the alchemy of experience passed through the poet’s vision is missing.
In another poem from the same collection, “The Couple”, Olds is able to move from a simple inventory of the actual sight of her two children sleeping in the back of a car:
rulers of separate countries, sister and
brother. Her big hard head
lolls near his narrow oval skull
until they are crown to crown, brown
hair mingling like velvet. Mouths
open, the rosebud and her cupid’s bow,
they dream against each other, her calm
almond eyes and his round blue eyes
closed, quivering like trout.
to a larger imaginative “embodied vision”:
they look like a small
royal bride and groom, the bride still a
head taller, married as children
in the Middle Ages, for purposes of state,
fighting all day, and finding their only
union in sleep, in the dark solitary
power of the dream–the dream of ruling the world.
(Olds, 80)
While I agree with Muske that Olds is a talented poet, I also believe “The Takers” is illustrative of a good deal of her work which is based on personal experience and that this sort of poetry can truly be called confessional. In the past, confessional poetry has most often been associated with such 20th century poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton; all four were branded with this label, Sexton and Plath especially so. Ironically, although Sexton and Plath wrote about intensely personal and often painful subjects, literary history has revealed the extent of the technique and craft that went into their work. Anne Sexton remarked of her work to Paris Review:
I don’t adhere to literal facts all the time; I make them up whenever needed. Concrete examples give a verisimilitude. I want the reader to feel,”Yes, yes, that’s the way it is” I want them to feel as if they were touching me. I would alter any word, attitude, image, or persona for the sake of the poem.
(quoted in Maio, 182)
Both Sexton and Plath wrote about subjects that made people uncomfortable–menstruation, suicide, incest, sex– at a time when women were still expected to be “nice”; perhaps this led to their being dismissed as merely “confessional”.
When I use the term “confessional”, what I am referring to is the sort of contemporary poem that is reminiscent of the achingly personal journal entry, nearly devoid of craft, technique, or unifying theme. In a recent AWP Chronicle article, Edward Lense describes contemporary confessional poetry as
…poetry that is simply an unmediated expression of emotions, not recollected in tranquility but spoken directly to an audience. In the case of a coffeehouse reading or a poetry slam, the audience is physically present, while in the case of an Internet posting or publication in a micro-magazine, the poet knows that the text will soon be available to a more dispersed audience of people who, very likely, are writing the same kind of poetry and posting it in the same places. This kind of poetry is “confessional” in that it is almost invariably drawn from personal experience, and like the frank talk in daytime media, exposes to public view things that would have been deeply hidden in (Mark) Van Doren’s time. In a time when television routinely broadcasts intimate details of people’s lives, and group therapy, and twelve-step organizations are part of daily life, there is nothing remarkable about using poetry as a form of self-expression. (18)
Sadly, there is nothing remarkable about such poetry created as an “unmediated” vehicle of self-expression. Self-expression, while valuable in and of itself, is not art. Art requires the mediation of craft, vision, technique, along with some modicum of self-restraint with regards to one’s self and generosity towards one’s readers. A certain degree of humility or humbleness is required when writing first person experiential narrative, especially those that involve dramatic material. Not a self-conscious humility that points to itself, but a muted integral sense of standing in the background to let the reader in. Otherwise, the unmediated personal poem may as well remain locked away in a diary; it serves no one but the writer, the only one with the key to their own emotional Esperanto.
A poet who undertakes the art of writing experiential narrative poetry must constantly contend with the art of balance. She must continually ask herself how much to hide, how much to show, when to step aside, and how? How much personal material tempered by how much craft? How much masking of the self is beneficial? How much reserve is too much?
Rita Dove and Lynda Hull, two poets whose work I am repeatedly drawn to, have wrestled with the questions of balancing truth, memory, and craft in their narrative poetry. Each in her own way demonstrates strengths and weaknesses from which I have drawn lessons.
The late Lynda Hull, a poet of sometimes hypnotic immersion in the play of words, created a masque– a sort of verbal maquillage that allowed her to sing the devastation, beauty, and pain of her own harrowing past, as well as of those she loved and survived. In his Afterword of her post-humously published collection The Only World, poet Mark Doty has written of her penchant for maquillage in her personal and public life:
My friend Lynda Hull spent her life impersonating an extraordinary woman. Perhaps personate might be a better verb; it’s not that anything about the performance was false but that Lynda was devoted to the creation of a self, on the page and off. Her artifice, her maquillage–literal and verbal–were not disguises but part of a quest for the authentic. Like the drag performers she loved, Lynda understood that the authentic self is not necessarily the naked one; we forge ourselves as we forge our poems, out of the materials at hand: our histories, the stuff of character and circumstance, all the occasions of style. Style, at its highest, is not decoration but a gesture of revelation; surface can be, when most deliberate, most consciously wrought, what John Ashbery called someplace ” a visible core”.(75)
Hull took the raw material of her history, her addictions, her character, her sense of style, and spun it all into the revelations of her poems. Her poetry is characterized by cascading imagery, the shifting and tilting of time, narrated by a stylized “I” in language that seems in love with itself. Hull’s poems revel in the play of the sounds and shapes of language even as they describe dramatic events. Here is a portion of Hull’s long poem “Red Velvet Jacket”:
It’s almost Biblical driving this midnight burning highway
past South Bronx exits
with the names of streets once known, where torched cars
spiral columns
acetylene blue & white. We’re in the universe of lost things
where the lights are out,
the lamp pawned & soon the record player, that enameled
table
clothes, the rooms & faces,
air hissing soft through the rolled-down window like
silk velvet slipping hot
into my hand-bag, velvet fine as a fingerprint whorl,
maroon as the long dusty cars
that sharked these avenues, mildewed upholstery like
it was always raining night,
the insides ripped out of everything. But I was talking
about the red velvet jacket
With its layers of imagery– “velvet fine as a fingerprint whorl/ maroon as the long dusty cars/”, with its imaginative verbs– cars that “shark” and “spiral columns”, with the music of assonance, consonance–”air hissing soft through the rolled-down window”, with its rhythmic pacing, this is clearly a poem that has been crafted, not transcribed. Yet, somehow we believe that the speaker, this stylized “I”, has traveled “this midnight burning highway/ past South Bronx exits”.
So sure is this voice, that alternates between stylish narration and the conversational tone of “But I was talking/ about the red velvet jacket”, that we trust her to take us on this ride with her. In an interview with David Dillon, Richard Hugo said of poetic voice:
Voice is usually something that grows out of stance. It has to do with how strong a person’s urge is to reject the self and to create another self in its place. (Quoted in Maio,1)
With her meticulous attention to detail, the observant and imaginative “I” (eye) that Hull creates invites us along as she takes in the vistas of memory unfolding around her as the poem continues:
that hangs even now in the mind flaring its slow veronicas
in recollection’s wind that breathes
the mineral glamour of cornices & pilasters, districts
that burned years ago.
These days at the fringes even trains turn express,
the bombed-out blocks & clustered faces
blurred featureless. Out of sight, out of mind. Midnight’s
burning highway, another charred strip-job.
The specific details of “slow veronicas/ in recollection’s wind”, and “the mineral glamour of cornices & pilasters, districts” act as moments of stop-action in the anarchic flow of “midnight’s/ burning highway” where “even trains turn express,/the bombed-out blocks & clustered faces/blurred featureless”.
The path of the narrative mimics memory’s stops and starts, blurrings and sudden clearings as the poet tries to “gather back the gleaming fragments & Warsaw/ flashes”. Recalling her ride past burnt out ghetto buildings and “the trams’ blackened windows”, the speaker is now reminded of “a museum model of the Ghetto–/ the Jews immured, a system of catwalks and barricades,”. Perhaps, because the speaker is not likening herself to the victims of the Holocaust, her comparison of ghetto/Ghetto is not distasteful in the way of Sharon Olds’s sister/Nazi, self/victim analogy.
The speaker does not refer directly to herself within the action until stanzas five, six and seven, at first obliquely, then directly:
the strangeness, the story endlessly told any life unfurls,
causal chains of small decisions,
almost random, those accidents of grace or luck. That red velvet
’30’s jacket. How it sleeked
over the hips, elaborate glass buttons, how it made me feel
a little dangerous, a sense
of stolen fortune or history, as if I’d been chosen
for extraordinary moments, as if
I’d walked untouched, fire parting smoothly before me, liquid
& blue, that refused to singe,
to mar the bearer with a scar to signify the event.
Red velvet the color
of that long car we’d cruise under the river through
Alphabetown,
then the Bronx, Hunts Point
& its flooded streets awash with crates of rotting fruit,
streets that figure still
relentless in the endless anarchy of dreams–
the Puerto Rican dealer, Juan his wife, the kid.(Shift the car
to 5th, don’t stop,
don’t slow down.) But the door splinters all over again.
The jump-the-dealer routine.
Red velvet sleeve rolled up, snake of blue vein, snake
of salsa rising from the streets,
the warmth sexual, turning me capable, the grain of wood (7-8)
As the night wears on, the party turns ugly– a boy dangles a baby out a window, threatens to drop it– and the voice, the “sole white face” in the crowd, stops him by screaming “Give me the baby” in Spanish.
The “I” that slowly emerges from the speeding, smoky, color-washed background of the poem can be said to fulfill the function of the “personal poet’s persona” as put forth by Samuel Maio in his book-length thesis Creating Another Self:
…the poet creates a persona–one called “I” or by a proper noun– to act as the personal poet’s speaker, and it is this speaker’s self which is defined by the poem’s “images of the self,” and only to the extent they are depicted in the poem. Therefore the personal poet, consciously or not, substitutes for his or her literal, historical self a literary self as voice of the poem, one that is sincere but not altogether authentic. (2)
Maio defines the terms sincere and authentic by paraphrasing Lionel Trilling’s thesis of Sincerity and Authenticity, which claims that a poet who reveals their private (literal) self in a poem is authentic, while the poet who presents a self that is “differs, however slightly, from the private self…is sincere” but only partly “veracious”. (2) Having defined these terms, Maio goes on to clarify his concept of the personal poet as one who rejects his literal(authentic) self and creates “another, sincere self in its place…a self expressed as the persona-speaker of their personal poems”. (4)
The persona that Hull creates to narrate the strange, drug-fueled memory-ride of “Red Velvet Jacket” survives that night and steps forward to the present, the uncertain future.
called back from the ruins in that jacket, dark stain blooming
through the sleeve, the child squalling
in my useless arms. I don’t know what happened to the jacket
& all those people are lost to a diaspora,
the borough incinerated around them, nowhere in this night
I drive through. Silk velvet and its rich hiss
the shade of flame offering its drapery, its charm
against this world burning ruthless, crucial & exacting. (8-9)
Although the red velvet jacket is physically gone, its image remains a touch stone of her passage through a “world burning ruthless”, a symbol of what she once was, and what she survived. That the persona’s voice has gone on to narrate the poem is yet more proof of her endurance.
Dorothy Baressi, in her review of The Only World for The Gettysburg Review, wrote:
…Hull closely aligned her poetic persona with the junkies and castoffs she wrote about. This is her signature: survivor, witness, recorder of the lost and the damned…Hull keeps us riveted as she lovingly describes each wrecked face and city facade in a kind of scat jazz singing that sounds very fresh, incantatory, to use Denise Levertov’s word. (70)
I believe Hull is able to keep us attentive because she doesn’t focus too much on her role in whatever song she’s singing; she is not Survivor or Witness decked out in sparkling capitals. As Baressi notes, Hull is able to combine her two loves–language and subject–skillfully. She blends lyricism with narrative with a lushness of mood and sound that only rarely borders on excess. Hull’s occasional weakness can be said to be the result of too much of a good thing. In evoking descriptive mood, the focus of her poems sometimes becomes fuzzy, the gorgeous details too diffuse, as in the first two stanzas of “Bar Xanadu”:
A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air
before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands.
Tipped with silken fruit tinselled gold,
a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles,
burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak
the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s
fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile.
Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal
seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs
her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men.
Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in
to wash at the single cold water tap. (63)
The rich details are perhaps too fast and furious; the “scalloped” air and the ” silken fruit tinselled gold” seem to collide with the “burnt orange” “dusty banderilla” too close to the “lacquered fingers” holding the “globe of cognac”. In the second stanza, the leap from the bar to “fields of chamomile” to the night which “turns to coal seamed with diamonds” borders on excessive. As she then turns her gaze to the girl who “murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men”, I’m tempted to agree with Baressi, who notes at times Hull “veer(s) dangerously that close to sentimentality”. Yet, I’m willing to take her excesses in stride and learn from them.
A strength of Hull’s poems is that they are never solely concerned with the autobiographical; her subject matter is often fused with the inescapable social issues of our times– such as the AIDS epidemic and the violence found in our cities. Indeed, in “The Window”, Hull writes, “Oh, the many lives that have fountained through/ my own…” (73)
Although Hull’s work springs from the experiences–real and imagined–of herself and others, it is never mired in it. Through her imaginative word-play, her stylistic turns of voice and vision, experience is alchemized into poetry. In this way she achieves the leap from actuality to Gluck’s definition of experience/memory illuminated into “embodied vision”; her poems remain truly “alive” even after her untimely 1994 death.
If Lynda Hull’s poems can be characterized by lushness, effusive language and occasional excess, Rita Dove’s poems are marked by elegance, control, and a persona kept at a remove that sometimes borders on absence. Her lines are clean, structured, her language distilled to a pristine essence. Like Hull, much of Dove’s work is experiential narrative in which the personal is woven into the historical.
Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is a book-length series of poems, which when read in sequence as intended, form a narrative of the lives of a married African-American couple, loosely based on Dove’s own grandparents. Spanning from 1900-1969, a period that included the Great Migration of blacks from rural south to the urban north, the book is divided into two sections, Mandolin, is Thomas’ section, Canary in Bloom, is Beulah’s. On the whole, these poems are stanzaic, consisting mainly of tercets and quatrains. Two longer poems in Thomas’ portion are broken into numbered sections. All of the poems are narrated by an unnamed omniscient speaker; the character’s voices, set off by italics appear from time to time.
While I enjoy and admire Dove’s imaginative economy of language and precise diction, I’m puzzled at her choice to remove the poet’s persona entirely from these narratives of her grandparents’ lives. The all-knowing narrator in these poems seems cold and distant, the images like glancings of photographs; the poems themselves too easily parcelled up in their endings. Here is an example of such an ending in the third poem of Beulah’s section, “Courtship, Diligence”:
A yellow scarf runs through his fingers
as if it were melting.
Thomas dabbing his brow.
And now his mandolin in a hurry
though the night, as they say,
is young,
though she is getting on.
Hush, the strings tinkle. Pretty gal.
Cigar-box music!
She’d much prefer a pianola
and scent in a sky-colored flask.
Not that scarf, bright as butter.
Not his hands, cool as dimes. (50)
On the face of it, this is a lovely, well-made poem which cleanly avoids sentimentality. Yet, I can’t help feeling that it is too well-made, like a tightly hinged box that snaps shut at the end. Perhaps, in my assessment of this poem, I’m betraying my own stylistic tendencies, which, if given free reign, veer more towards the excesses of Hull than the tidiness of Dove.
Still, I’m drawn to Rita Dove’s work and to poem’s like “The Event”, the first poem in Thomas’ section:
Ever since they’d left the Tennessee ridge
with nothing to boast of
but good looks and a mandolin,
the two Negroes leaning
on the rail of a riverboat
were inseparable: Lem plucked
to Thomas’ silver falsetto.
But the night was hot and they were drunk.
They spat where the wheel
churned mud and moonlight,
they called to the tarantulas
down among the bananas
to come out and dance.
You’re so fine and mighty; let’s see
what you can do, said Thomas, pointing
to a tree-capped island.
Lem stripped, spoke easy: Them’s chestnuts
I believe. Dove
quick as a gasp. Thomas, dry
on deck, saw the green crown shake
as the island slipped
under, dissolved
in the thickening stream.
At his feet
a stinking circle of rags,
the half-shell mandolin.
Where the wheel turned the water
gently shirred. (12)
So much is evoked and unfolded in these ten short stanzas. A poem such as “The Event” showcases Dove’s finely honed economy of style. The emotion in this poem stays at the level of undercurrent, like the water “gently shirred”. The next poem builds on the unfolding of Thomas’ reaction to Lem’s death; because they were written to be read in sequence, each poem is linked to and builds on the next. The poems in Thomas’ section are sometimes linked to and sometimes parallel those in Beulah’s section. For example, “Courtship, Diligence”, discussed previously, contains an echoes of the yellow scarf and mandolin (which are Thomas’ emblems) in “Courtship” from Thomas’ section:
King of the Crawfish,
in his yellow scarf,
mandolin belly pressed tight
to his hounds-tooth vest–(16)
After his courtship and marriage to Beulah, the mandolin– Thomas’ main emblem– fades into the background. It only returns, briefly, in two poems. In “Compendium” it becomes a symbol of what he has given up for his new life with Beulah: “In the parlor, with streamers/ a bug on a nail./ The canary courting its effigy”.(28) In the very next poem, “Definition in the Face of Fury”, the yellow scarf and mandolin becomes a deeper symbol of lost time: “That dragonfly, bloated, pinned/ to the wall, its gossamer wings in tatters/(yellow silk actually faded in rivulets)–/what is it? A pendulum/ with time on its hands, a frozen/ teardrop”. When
Thomas finally reaches for the mandolin again, he finds that he’s too late. “How long has it been…?/ Too long. Each note slips/ into querulous rebuke, fingerpads/ scored with pain, shallow ditches/ to rut in like a runaway slave/ with a barking heart.” (29)
Likewise, Beulah’s canary emblem shows up in “Lightnin’ Blues” in Thomas’ section :
On the radio a canary bewailed her luck
while the country outside was kicking with rain. (27)
before she is mentioned in the title of Beulah’s portion of the book, Canary in Bloom, and we meet her in “Dusting”, in which she tries to recall the name of an old beau:
Not Michael–
something finer, Each dust
stroke a deep breath and
the canary in bloom. (52)
The canary appears in several poems, the beautiful songbird kept in a cage symbolic of Beulah’s unexplored yearnings, the dreams she left untouched–her yearning for Paris for example– throughout her life with Thomas. Still the canary “blooms” and sings, signally some satisfaction.
There is much muted emotion in the finely crafted poems that form Thomas and Beulah; even rage, regret and sorrow are kept at a subdued level by Dove’s characterizations and techniques. From the raw material of her knowledge, memory and research of her grandparents’ lives, Dove has created a new reality–an “embodied vision” which encompasses craft and vision.
In looking at the challenge of achieving a poetry that moves from the truth of actual experience to the truth of “embodied vision” as defined by Gluck, I have looked at four poets who reside on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end, Forche and Olds begin with actual experiences, both personal and reported, but do not move far from merely recounting. While both talented poets who have written some memorable pieces, their work is largely devoid of the transformative power of craft, vision and technique which the art of poetry requires. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Hull and Dove, who in strikingly different styles, discovered how to move from the springboard of experience/memory through the alchemical process of re-visioning the truth of the actual to the truth of the “embodied vision” of the poem.
The poet’s task of reaching the “embodied vision” may seem a daunting, even contradictory challenge. Louise Gluck states–
The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is instead, all that can be envisioned…the materials are subjective, but the methods are not. (45)
Perhaps it helps to restate the challenge in the words of Emily Dickinson who exhorts us to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–/Success in Circuit lies” (Johnson,ed., 248 ) I believe that the transforming “slant” is the prism through which the poet re-invents experience into poetry.
It has become clear to me as I’ve worked on this essay that without the process of illumination, “actuality”–unadulterated experience– can become a trap for the writer who hopes to create art by faithfully telling the truth. I’ve found that a way out of that particular trap is found in opening experience to “all that can be envisioned”. (45) Telling the truth, as Louise Gluck warns “is not necessarily the path to illumination.” (33)
As I mentioned earlier, I came to agree with Gluck’s assertions about truth in poetry after no small amount of struggle. Releasing myself from the bonds of “truth-telling” has allowed me to re-envision the personal and family stories I am compelled to return to time and again in my writing. With this release comes another task and a gift– the task is to infuse my raw material with the question “What if…?”. The gift is permission to re-vision that which I know, that which I’ve forgotten, and all that could be imagined. Neither gift nor task are easy, but in struggling to use both I’ve freed myself from the drudgery of truth-transcription and opened up my work to the possibility of true illumination.
Nancy Willard, in her essay “The Well-Tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling”, has this to say about the writer’s path to illumination and thus to art:
The teller tells the story he has made out of bits he has seen and pieces he has heard. His telling brings these fragments together, and in that healing synthesis, he gives the wasted hours of our lives an order they don’t have and a radiance only God and the artist can perceive. We get up, we go to work, we come home dead tired, and sometimes we wonder what we are doing on this planet. And we know in the great schemelessness of things, our own importance is a lie. Is the object of the game to tell that lie? Yes, to tell the lie. But in the telling to make it true. (Willard, 239 )
I would go one step further than Willard, to say that when the writer does her work using all the tools at her disposal–memory, experience, witness, craft and vision– that “radiance” or “illumination” will also be perceived by her readers.
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