Sherry Chandler

The troublesome “I” revisited

In a post on Umberto Saba, Robert Peake makes this observation:

So much of contemporary poetry seems to be a reaction against sentimentality and self-aggrandizement. To this end, many poets seem to be attempting to remove themselves as a direct presence in their poems. Persona poetry is one device by which an interplay of consciousness can exist without the complications of the troublesome “I.” Yet without the poet in the poem, so many poems of consummate craft fall short of the ultimate aim — to touch on the human condition in a way that transcends intellectual tinkering.

That troublesome “I” shows up almost constantly in my poetry, so I felt somewhat encouraged reading Robert’s comment. Just as I felt considerably taken to task by Ted Kooser in his chapter “Working with Detail” from The Poetry Home Repair Manual:

For the past fifty years or thereabouts, readers of contemporary poetry have grown more and more accustomed to poems about the poet, poems in which the pronoun “I” is preeminent. We sometimes call this “confessional poetry” because the poet bares his or her soul, confessing to this or that. The poet is at center stage; everything in the world seems to be placed in reference to him or to her.

Kooser goes on to describe several poems that use a method he describes as in the manner of “the spy in the hotel lobby,” poems in which the poet observes but does not “appear.” That is to say, the poem is written in third person and presents a bit of drama, such as an overheard conversation, an observed meeting.

I don’t react well to being chastised and this chapter from Kooser’s book got my back up a little bit. To be fair, it’s the only chapter of the book I’ve read so I may have a skewed view. Still, the argument seems a bit disingenuous. It conflates a first person poem with the dreaded “confessional” poem and it assumes that a poem in the third person somehow removes the poet from center stage. It assumes that the poet should not be at center stage.

But every poem, especially every lyric poem, has an observing consciousness and that observer is at the center of the poem whether “I” or “she” is used. Dramatic monologues/personna poems or third-person drama poems are still projections of the poet’s worldview. So the whole problem of the “I” seems artificial to me. Poets have used the perceiving “I” since Horace, since Sappho, since Shakespeare.

The problem is confessional poetry, which you might say breaks the proscenium arch, the convention that the “I” in the poem is not the poet herself. In the wrong hands, such soul-baring can be an embarassment to all. Sentimental, as Robert says, and self-aggrandizing. Yet, as Robert also implies, we have come to expect that poems will give us, not universal truths, but the truth of an individual human heart, which might also give us a glimpse into our own.

This seems like a good place for this thought from Charles Bernstein, from his Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

Part of the arrogance of what is sometimes miscalled modernism…is that…one could be representative of “man” or of a cultural moment or of a people. But every particular is such precisely because of what it necessarily excludes. So what is to be proclaimed is this not-all, this insistence that there are ony margins no universals; only partialities… For “one” lives not to proclaim only but to listen for that which is not conceivable in one’s “own” self-same world…

Related posts:

American Life in Poetry

Poet Laureate Kooser Gets Pulitzer in Poetry

Patronizing the Masses

The nature of the short story revisited

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