Truth, Lies, and Other People's Lives
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 02:57PM 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?).
Reader Comments (6)
In order to stop compulsive lying, it first has to be acknowledged. Compulsive liars are people who have developed a habit of lying for no reason. They lie frequently, and the lies feel comfortable. In other words there is no compunction about lying. Much of the time the compulsive liar is lying without any real thought given to the lie. That is because lying has become a habit. In order to stop lying, the habit must be stopped or changed into a positive behavior.
thanks a lot dear, im very interesting for your article. im very impresing for this :)
jasa iklan
thank you.
เกมส์
Wow! awesome,. Thanks for the great information, very helpful and informative. Thank you for the sharing of information.^^
Kinda Hong
Handbags clutches Shop
Thank you for this great information. Its really very nice information.
Poetry is so unique that even other people lives can be told using poetry. I for one love to write poems and it reflects on my work some the unforgetful events of my life. I guess real life is not just about prose it is also about poetry.
Groom Wedding Speech