Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inherent tension between confession and aesthetics and how easily creative work can lend itself to the illusion of some kind of journalistic truth. Part of what prompts this is having recently Googled myself (what, you don’t occasionally?) which led to a minor panic attack at the idea that a reader might think those poems and essays scattered across the Internet reveal any deep truth about my life.
Leaving aside the unlikely idea that some online Sherlock Holmes is reading all my prior publications as he assembles his Casebook of Kate, it’s still strange to feel trapped in a certain time or situation because of something I once wrote.
This concern may be less relevant to my fiction-writing friends or journalists who somehow, unlike me, manage to write about things other than themselves (an ancient bobcat buried wearing a necklace of bear claws and marine shells! the life cycle of bees!), but the conflation of confession with poetry is a pretty commonly accepted trope. Sandra Simonds wrote about this two weeks ago on this blog, mentioning the way “unlike fiction, people inevitably assume that the speaker in a poem is the writer…And poets can use this blurry line to their advantage.”
I know we assume this. I often do too. But it seems strange to me that we do. Even in the Confessional tradition, the self is performed—there’s wordplay and attention to image and often rhyme or slant rhyme. Among all that artistry, the confessing self becomes a mask. The author presents a face that’s polished up and shining while the real self (weird and vulnerable, snarling or smiling or weeping) still gets to hide.
One of the first lectures I give in my poetry workshop is about persona poems. I love persona poems for the freedom they give us: we no longer have to purportedly speak as ourselves. And they’re a perfect quick fix for writer’s block—Sick of yourself? Run out of things to say? Try writing a poem where the speaker is Elizabeth Taylor or Louis the Sun King or a victim of the bubonic plague! (Obviously I imagine this spoken like an adman’s pitch with catchy background music).
But I also love persona poems because they give me an excuse to talk about the persona of self that we cloak ourselves in for any poem that we write, even the ones that aren’t obviously spoken by a different character. The Kate I am in my poetry (Poetry Kate) isn’t Hanging-Out-With-Her-Friends Kate who isn’t Baking-A-Pie-For-Her-Family Kate who isn’t Trying-To-Do-A-Better-Pull-Up Kate or Professor Kate or the Kate who is talking to someone cute on the train. Poetry Kate is one aspect of me, of course, and some of what I say about my life is true, but whatever facts are there are really just a launch pad for language. Once the first draft is done, everything gets edited for the sake of line breaks and sound and imagery.
I had a wonderful teacher in high school, Mike Delp, who used to tell us that it’s the emotional truth that matters in a poem, not the facts. In graduate school, my thesis advisor / Poetry Gandalf Matthew Zapruder called this the aesthetic truth, reminding us that you can put a scarlet tanager in any poem you want to if that scarlet tanager should be in the poem—who cares if the bird isn’t native to the region where your poem lives.
When it comes to lyric essays, where there’s often a narrative attached and the genre itself is called “nonfiction” (indicating that nothing in the piece is made up), I still think this idea of the I-as-persona holds true.
No matter what, we chose the parts of ourselves and our experiences that we present to the world. It’s not because we’re Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men shouting “You can’t handle the truth!” at an idealistic young Tom Cruise; rather, we can’t ever tell the entire story—we don’t have the time, the space, or the perspective to see our experiences clearly from every angle. And once we have told our version of the story, it stays static—a fly in amber, a butterfly pinned and labeled in the display box—while the world moves forward.
A few months ago I was talking to someone who’d just read one of my essays and assumed the situation I’d written about was recent. Because he’s not a writer, it makes sense he’d think that—the piece is in the present tense. But the actual timeline was that I had something that felt almost like a strange heartbreak happen three years ago, I wrote the essay half a year later, revised it, and submitted it to various literary journals for another year. Finally, it was picked up and then the journal waited to publish it for another eleven months. Now when I reread the piece, I barely remember any of what happened or how I felt. It might have once been a true confession, but it’s all old news now, and even if the events still were recent, I defer to Vivian Gornick whose memoir The Odd Woman and the City I urge you all to read. I love (and entirely agree with) this line in her book: “It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.”