Last week, in a post called Three Ways of Looking at Poetry, I linked to three different blog posts that dealt, more or less, with what each poster thought poetry was for.
To that conversation now, I’d like to add Fleda Brown’s Who I Write For, a “rant” which begins:
I have been reading the recent omnibus book review by my friend Kevin Clark in The Georgia Review. Kevin is always smart, perceptive, and open to many kinds of poetry. Here is what he has to say about one book of poems in which, he acknowledges, it’s difficult to tell what’s happening or even who’s speaking: “We can’t be sure of the details, and therefore we can’t contextualize the speaker’s problem.”
He goes on to generously explain this poet’s work by saying that he realizes that in her poems, the poet wants to “demonstrate pandemic victimization and she wants to personalize such suffering—but she doesn’t want to privilege any one person in such a way that we’ll ignore worldwide troubles.”
In other words, if I hear him right, this poet doesn’t want to make the suffering she depicts in her poems personal, because we might locate suffering in THAT place and not others.
Maybe it’s a good book, maybe not. The poems function like a koan. They mean to disrupt our rational minds. The point of a koan is to open the mind to the truth that both is and isn’t rational. It’s a teaching tool to be used by an awakened teacher.
But the poems in that book are to be read by you and me. The ones I’ve read do not move me. I am not changed by them. I grow tired very quickly of dislocation. I can admire the skill, the variety of expression, the interesting leaps, but honestly, I will never turn back to them.
And I have to steal one more paragraph from Fleda (a great poet, read her stuff!):
My nephew Kevin, who’s written music for Yo-Yo Ma, says that Ma told him he used to think he loved music, but he found it’s people he loves. This is why he’s a great cellist. This is what makes a great poet. In the early stages of writing, there seems to be a need for obliviousness to “effect,” but gradually, we look outward with respect for the other person, the reader.
It goes without saying that Ma is also a great cellist because he has discipline and because he has a deep-seated understanding of the music through which he can speak his love to the people. Love isn’t all. Work is involved. Which I’m sure Fleda Brown takes as a given.
Brown goes on to talk about wisdom, which hits me where I’m vulnerable. I would like somehow to be wise. So I’m tempted to say yes! yes! poetry is distilled wisdom. [Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, right?]
But that statement unfortunately seems to me to speak to the holiness of the poet, and once I start thinking that way, I’m silenced. Because I am no more wise or holy than any other human being. Certainly I’m not deep.
What I am, I hope, is honest. And if I’m honest, I probably have to say I write for myself.
Brown also speaks of being “broken open” [by poetry] so as to feel. By which I infer she means to experience compassion. Yes! I want to say. I love writing that breaks me open. But then, to be honest, I have a deep distrust of writing to the emotions. People’s emotions can be used to manipulate them. Emotional writing can bring people to hatred as quickly as to compassion.
Somewhere there must be a core of ethics.
If the dichotomy is intellect or emotion, well, I sit firmly on the fence.
So why do I write? Who do I write for?
I write because I love the people I write about and want to honor them in all their human complexity — strong and weak.
I write out of vanity. I’m clever and I like to show off.
I write because I love language and love to make something singing out of language that has not been there before.
I write because I have bad hands and can’t play the mandolin.
I write to entertain — and no harm in that.
I write to read — I love to carry an audience with my words. And I believe poetry begins with the breath.
I write because I love names and love to use names in poems.
I write as a sort of spiritual practice. By giving myself over to the language, I can escape ego and, if I’m lucky and good, maybe discover something that will help my spirit to grow.
I write to discover what I think. To quote E. M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
If out of this comes some good for you, my reader, then I am delighted and I have served a purpose beyond my own selfish concerns.
But in all honesty, I have to say I don’t write for the purpose of doing good. I think that would kill the wriitng.
I write for myself.
