Last night I typed out a long entry about privacy because I am feeling a little invaded lately. It is constant war of how much of your self to reveal. I believe a good writer must reveal everything and then you have readers who then want to talk about it or repost somewhere you did not want it to be.
Plus one of the horrible/ wonderful things about word is that it cannot be owned. You can cut /copy anything. Yet I feel like my words are the deepest part of who I am. I believe I could be fully understood if someone listened to my poetry, really listened. It is the core of who I am…these words. So what do you do when they come back to bite you on the ass?
I suppose you move on, write some more. Believe that every day you have the possibility to write a better poem. Every day is waiting for that one moment when all the letters obey, fall into their place, when you are blest or damn because there is nothing more beautiful then this.
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8 comments:
"I believe a good writer must reveal everything."
Why? Good god. Why reveal anything? I don't understand what that has to do with writing, poetry or anything else. Certainly you want to be honest, as in having integrity with your work, but why put your whole life out for everyone to see? Why not invent your poetry? Why not write fiction inside your poems, throw up a little smoke to save yourself? Especially if it makes you uncomfortable. I guess I just don't understand your need to 'reveal everything.' Yikes. Double yikes. One of the most important things I learned from studying with Sharon Olds was to hold back a bit. She called herself The Monster Girl, and was very, very sorry at all that she had revealed in her early books. She said she didn't believe people were going to read them.
at the time she wrote them, I mean. She cautioned me against doing exactly what you're speaking of.
Okay then Rebecca questions, do you think if Sharon had not done that she would be where she is now? And which writing is stronger for you, the things you make up or things that actually happen? I am not being naïve and saying you have to write about truth all the time. I will change a poem, if it serves the poem and hell sometimes my life is just plain boring.
What am I saying? I think what I am trying to get across, is that even in fiction a writer reveals their core. The strongest writing comes from being in touch with whom you are, the center.
One of the reasons I read your blog every day is because you do that. You don’t hold back even if you delete it ten minutes later ;) I think writers, as a species of people have a need to be heard, understood. Even with making up things, there are parts of us there. And that need though sometimes wonderful, makes us vulnerable.
I think Sharon is where she is because her writing is strong. It isn't the stories, necessarily, but it is the writing, the craft, that got her there. Her artfulness makes her readable. And she is now editing her early books to remove the names of people that she feels she has offended.
As for me, the personal writing I do in which I spill the beans (tell the *whole* truth) is absolutely my weakest writing. In those poems I lose my objectivity, I lose my voice, I get fooled into thinking that my life is interesting and, after time, realize it isn't. I publish very few of those poems. Very few. I wouldn't want to because they're just not good poems and for reasons you stated in your original post.
Truth, yes, as core, yes, as a place to write from is probably necessary, at least it is for me, though I'm not convinced every writer needs it. Telling the whole truth is a different matter.
I tend to tell more of the truth in my blog than I probably should, but that is not my art. My blog is my daily writing practice, like playing scales. It helps my brain remember why I'm here.
Maybe, instead of the best writers revealing everything, the best writers are, in fact, the very best liars?
:>p
Yes, that is possible that we lie so well we fool even ourselves.
Blogging for me is like dieting on fig newtons. It gives me instant grafication and still makes me feel like I did something literary.
And whatever you do on your blog, dont stop doing it. I enjoy it very much, the same with your poetry.
I think the way Sharon writes in her early books and what I am talking about are two different things. For me "writing everything down" isn't about naming names or using writing for theraphy. I would agree, if and when I do that it is pretty damn weak poetry. Writing everything down for me is about observing the world from my own set of eyes. If that makes any sense.
It makes absolute sense, and I suspect you are saying the same thing I'm saying when I talk about integrity in the body of work, in craft, which has little to do with exposing the private self.
I think it really depends on the poet, what "I" means and how much masking is involved. If you ask someone like Ted Kooser or Jim Moore, they'll tell you that the lyric "I" should be the voice of the poet. I don't have *that* much invested the persona that it needs to be me all of the time, but I do feel that the integrity of a poem depends on a certain amount of truthtelling. Where the line gets blurry, I think, is between the emotional truth of the speaker and the truth in a private sense. I believe each poet wrestles with the amount of distance between the personal "I" and the inhabited "I". To complicate matters further, Joseph Brodsky often talked about the self as "a congress of selves" meaning, of course, that the self is mutable, too, and often takes up contradictory positions with itself base on context, emotion, distance, and other factors.
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