W. H. Auden once declared--it was in an interview, I believe, though I can't recall where or when I read it--that upon finishing a new poem, he was never entirely sure he could repeat the performance. This might have been tongue-in-cheek (ya think?), given the man's prolific output, but a truth underlies his admission. He was never sure, from composition to composition, whether he was creating a new work of art or just being "W. H. Auden, Famous Poet."
In other words, even Auden sometimes questioned his relationship to his art, how honestly he practiced it.
Back in January, I started a kind of thematic thread about the habits of poetry (see the blog entry for January 23). Along those lines, I've been thinking for the past week about the habit of "honesty" in poetry.
What I mean by this isn't what a generation ago was labeled "authenticity"--at least I don't mean just that--but rather "Am I being honest with myself about this poem I'm trying to write?"
And what I mean by this question is, whether I step back from a poem that I'm writing to examine my motive in writing it, to ask myself whether I really believe (in) what I'm laying down. This might be another way of stating my commitment to the art of the poem, or its artifice, the thing I am making. Am I really trying to listen to this poem and its demands, or am I just role-playing, being The Poet, the Man of Feeling, the Intellectual, the Wit, Mr. Wisdom? In other words, is this stuff a poem, or bullshit?
We've established or concurred at W@1 that pretty much any piece of writing that we produce is a poem if we choose to call it a poem. It's time we challenge that notion, individually and intimately, at the level of each composition, by asking ourselves Am I making art here, or am I simply "writing pretty"? Am I making a poem, or am I "expressing"?
Since the middle of the 20th Century, Western poetry, and especially American poetry, has taken a decidedly personal turn.* It has become a vehicle for personal expression, for imposing one's self upon on the world. Each poem we write is "authentic" insofar as it "comes from the heart" and/or expresses some "truth" as we personally see things. Read a poem that I've written and you can know something about me, the person. You'll hear echoes of the so-called confessional poets in this line of inquiry: they may have been artists, but to much of the poetry reading public, they were memoirists who rhymed. We read their work not so much for the art of the poetry as for clues about the writer's (tormented) life. Thus, the authenticity of a poem is its adherence to the facts of its writer's personality.
You won't be surprised to learn that T. S. Eliot wrote about the "extinction of personality" in the art of poetry. It has taken me a lifetime of study and thinking and my own writing to begin to understand what Eliot meant by that curious phrase. He didn't mean annihilation in that post-WW I Modernist sense, the sense that we are mere chits in a universe of forces that are beyond our control and our understanding. What he meant (an in this he was reacting against 100 years of poetic practice) is the poem as artifact is not personal statement; a poem is not a personal essay or a short memoir. It's a work of art just as any painting or sculpture or musical composition or dance figure is a work of art. In so far as a poem contains certain facts about a writer, or reveals certain aspects of a writer's personality, it is not a poem. If it is a poem, it is for other reasons. (And in a way, that's what we're after in W@1, I hope, to discover those reasons.)
How far we are today from that formulation! Poetry of protest, Instagram poetry, dog poetry, so-called confessional poetry, authentic poetry--these are all forms of writing driven by personality. What Eliot meant to describe by the phrase, "the extinction of personality," is the relation between the maker and the made: poems that are not made to be selfies, even when we use the first person pronoun in them.
So if we mean to cultivate the habit of honesty in our writing, one way of doing it is to step back from a poem we're working on and ask, Am I committed to this art or am I taking a selfie? The question is harder to answer, or its answer is harder to determine, than it is to ask. But therein lies the habit of honesty I'm talking about. The more you stop and ask yourself what you're doing with a piece of writing, ask yourself honestly, the better you will get at finding that answer. The more widely you read and experience poetry and so-called poetry, the more readily you'll recognize each kind. And this is the habit I am urging.
For next week, then, let's each bring a poem to W@1 that we have honestly asked these questions of. With the poem, let's each also try to come with some responses to the questions we ask. We'll share the poems, the questions, and, if we're lucky, the answers.
* That's not to say personal/biographical poetry--or its impulse--didn't get written before Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Louis Simpson began publishing their work. Philip Sidney: look in thy heart and write; William Wordsworth: emotion recollected in tranquility; Elizabeth Barrett Browning: how do I love thee; even Sappho: in my dripping pain. Or Ben Jonson (1616):
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! for why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
In other words, even Auden sometimes questioned his relationship to his art, how honestly he practiced it.
Back in January, I started a kind of thematic thread about the habits of poetry (see the blog entry for January 23). Along those lines, I've been thinking for the past week about the habit of "honesty" in poetry.
What I mean by this isn't what a generation ago was labeled "authenticity"--at least I don't mean just that--but rather "Am I being honest with myself about this poem I'm trying to write?"
And what I mean by this question is, whether I step back from a poem that I'm writing to examine my motive in writing it, to ask myself whether I really believe (in) what I'm laying down. This might be another way of stating my commitment to the art of the poem, or its artifice, the thing I am making. Am I really trying to listen to this poem and its demands, or am I just role-playing, being The Poet, the Man of Feeling, the Intellectual, the Wit, Mr. Wisdom? In other words, is this stuff a poem, or bullshit?
We've established or concurred at W@1 that pretty much any piece of writing that we produce is a poem if we choose to call it a poem. It's time we challenge that notion, individually and intimately, at the level of each composition, by asking ourselves Am I making art here, or am I simply "writing pretty"? Am I making a poem, or am I "expressing"?
Since the middle of the 20th Century, Western poetry, and especially American poetry, has taken a decidedly personal turn.* It has become a vehicle for personal expression, for imposing one's self upon on the world. Each poem we write is "authentic" insofar as it "comes from the heart" and/or expresses some "truth" as we personally see things. Read a poem that I've written and you can know something about me, the person. You'll hear echoes of the so-called confessional poets in this line of inquiry: they may have been artists, but to much of the poetry reading public, they were memoirists who rhymed. We read their work not so much for the art of the poetry as for clues about the writer's (tormented) life. Thus, the authenticity of a poem is its adherence to the facts of its writer's personality.
You won't be surprised to learn that T. S. Eliot wrote about the "extinction of personality" in the art of poetry. It has taken me a lifetime of study and thinking and my own writing to begin to understand what Eliot meant by that curious phrase. He didn't mean annihilation in that post-WW I Modernist sense, the sense that we are mere chits in a universe of forces that are beyond our control and our understanding. What he meant (an in this he was reacting against 100 years of poetic practice) is the poem as artifact is not personal statement; a poem is not a personal essay or a short memoir. It's a work of art just as any painting or sculpture or musical composition or dance figure is a work of art. In so far as a poem contains certain facts about a writer, or reveals certain aspects of a writer's personality, it is not a poem. If it is a poem, it is for other reasons. (And in a way, that's what we're after in W@1, I hope, to discover those reasons.)
How far we are today from that formulation! Poetry of protest, Instagram poetry, dog poetry, so-called confessional poetry, authentic poetry--these are all forms of writing driven by personality. What Eliot meant to describe by the phrase, "the extinction of personality," is the relation between the maker and the made: poems that are not made to be selfies, even when we use the first person pronoun in them.
So if we mean to cultivate the habit of honesty in our writing, one way of doing it is to step back from a poem we're working on and ask, Am I committed to this art or am I taking a selfie? The question is harder to answer, or its answer is harder to determine, than it is to ask. But therein lies the habit of honesty I'm talking about. The more you stop and ask yourself what you're doing with a piece of writing, ask yourself honestly, the better you will get at finding that answer. The more widely you read and experience poetry and so-called poetry, the more readily you'll recognize each kind. And this is the habit I am urging.
For next week, then, let's each bring a poem to W@1 that we have honestly asked these questions of. With the poem, let's each also try to come with some responses to the questions we ask. We'll share the poems, the questions, and, if we're lucky, the answers.
* That's not to say personal/biographical poetry--or its impulse--didn't get written before Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Louis Simpson began publishing their work. Philip Sidney: look in thy heart and write; William Wordsworth: emotion recollected in tranquility; Elizabeth Barrett Browning: how do I love thee; even Sappho: in my dripping pain. Or Ben Jonson (1616):
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! for why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
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