Truth, Lies, and Other People's Lives

Poets are not journalists or historians or even memoir writers, yet our poems often address other people's lives and public events. What is the poet's obligation to the facts? To truth? To other people? Why use poetry to address something that has already been written about in prose?

These are some of the questions I struggled with while I was writing the poems in The Serial Killer's Daughter. The poems arise from actual and reported events, yet the poems are works of imagination. My intention in writing this book was to create a work of art.

It is the book I never intended - or wanted - to write. A few years ago when I was preparing to teach a class, "The Poet as Witness" I was trying out exercises that I might assign the class. To my surprise, I found myself wrting from the point of view of Velma Barfield's daughter, or more accurately, the daughter as I imagined her. Okay, I thought: one poem, and I'm done. But it soon became clear that was like saying to myself, I'm just going to run a mile or two. So I let the poems come, even as I kept wondering why events 25 years in the past still resonated and demanded my attention. I'm not sure I'll ever have a logical explanation for why I wrote these poems.

The poems in the book are a fraction of what I wrote. As I tell my students, you have to love this work enough to write really horrible poems and to keep showing up at the blank page (or screen) every day.

I also like to quote Richard Hugo, who wrote in his wonderful book of essays on poetry, The Triggering Town: "The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts...You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."

I invite you to join me in Burnsville, NC, next week to explore the questions I posed at the beginning of this entry. Bring your own questions and let's explore the intersection of art and "real life." (Or should that be "reel" life?).

The Black Cat

The Black Cat on my Home page is Jessie (Jessica Grace). She's really my husband's cat since he found her in the middle of the road on the Saturday night before Halloween, 2002. We were returning home on a two-lane road from the Flat Rock Playhouse around 10 p.m. when suddenly Ed said, "There's a cat in the middle of the road and she's still alive!" I had seen only a black "blob" that looked to me like a piece of tire on the center line. But the kitten had raised her head as we passed and Ed saw her brilliant yellow eyes shining in the headlights. He turned the car around and stopped when we reached the kitten, jumped out and scooped her up in his hands. I slid over to the driver's seat and drove as fast as I dared to the emergency vet clinic. The kitten did not make a sound until we had almost reached the clinic and then it was a faint mew. I had seen blood on her mouth so my first thought was that she had internal injuries.

The vet. tech. took the kitten into the veterinarian. When she returned, she told us the kitten had no broken bones and all organs seemed to be working. The only apparent injuries were the broken teeth and skinned chin. Relieved, we decided to take her home rather than leave her there for observation.

We built a "nest" for her under the bathroom sink, brought in food, water, and a litter box and closed the door to separate her from our two 7-year-old cats. Ed named her Jessica after another black cat that had "found" him years ago. "Grace" came from the play we saw that night, "Grace and Glory" and seemed especially appropriate.

Jessie slept under the sink for 24 hours and slowly began to purr when we came in to stroke her fur. By Monday morning she was alert and ready for her first trip to our vet.  A thorough check-up confirmed that she had probably run into a car and had several teeth, including her left canines, knocked out. Other than the teeth, and a bad case of fleas, she was healthy 6-month-old kitten.

Although the two older cats were a bit leery of Jessie at first, she quickly won them over and the three remained close until Billy Dee died in 2004. Now Jessie and Mary Lou are never far apart and groom each other.

Lucky Jessie. Lucky us.