Sherry Chandler

Honesty or Exhibitionism?

I am drawn to “poetry of witness,” to the kind of poetry put together by Carolyn Forché in her anthology Against Forgetting, an anthology that she describes as “the result of a thirteen-year effort to understand the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination.” Who, if not poets, to articulate the cost of atrocity to our collective human spirit.

And yet I have doubts. One of my doubts is articulated in a review, Mourning in American, by Rochelle Gurstein that originally appeared in The New Republic. The review, ostensibly about Joan Didion’s new grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf 2005) also discusses C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed , a memoir of the death of his wife published in 1961, and both Donald Hall’s prose memoir, The Best Day the Worst Day, and his collection of poems, Without, on the death of his wife Jane Kenyon. The whole review is well worth reading, but it is in discussing Without that Gurstein articulates the question that I often ask myself about poetry of witness (a different though arguably related genre):

Many of these poems are, I think, art of considerable magnitude. Still, as I was reading them, I could not escape feeling that Hall was going too far, that there was something wrong in reading such poems and something wrong in publishing them. Especially with the ones that moved me most, I could not help wondering if their intensely personal subject was finally more powerful than their art. Being reduced to tears does not constitute an aesthetic experience. But perhaps that is Hall’s achievement: he makes the reader feel the irreconcilable relations between life, death, and art. Poems representing the deathbed should not work; but somehow, miraculously, Hall’s do.
…
Most of us have become so used to hearing and reading personal confessions by total strangers that we have lost the capacity to recognize when anyone’s privacy, living or dead, is being violated. The distinction between honesty and exhibitionism is increasingly unknown to us.

We have become a society that thrives on a sort of pornography of atrocity, as you can tell just by watching your local news. Every fire, every tornado has to have its on-camera interview with a distraught victim. Every pain is for sale, every loss is politically exploitable.

Perhaps Theodor Adorno was right when he said “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” He later recanted, saying “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream… hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.”

Gurstein does not articulate how Hall rises above personal emotion to the level of art. She does not have to. It is not a question I can answer. It’s a question I struggle with.

Possibly related posts:

The Perceptions of the Naive

Musing about Poets and Poetry

A Collection or a Book?

Writing is a blessed life

Seamus Heaney Interview

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