Poetry as autobiography. Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" gets several mentions, as does Lowell's use of a wife's letters. In the introduction it says "Aesthetically speaking, personal poems can go wrong in many ways ... they might fall anywhere in the deadly spectrum that runs from cocktail-party bore to megalomaniac" (p.6). But who cares if it's personal or not? "Questions like "can the speaker of the poem be identified with the poet" are "the equivalent of asking not if an object is useful or beautiful but how much it cost" (p.12). What is the self anyway? "We're an anthology of selves, and so, inconsistent; but the anthology is chosen by the same editor, and so, consistent" (p.12)
Andrew Hudgins' article includes a useful list of autobiographer's lies. The earlier one are white, consciously done and harmless -
- Removing the boring stuff. Combining minor characters.
- Replacing lost detail
- Adding fictional conventions
- Emotion evasion
- Recreating the self (i.e. lying to oneself)
- Appropriating facts from others' lives
- Inserting one's adult thoughts into one's childhood mind
- Misinterpreting memories
- Misunderstanding memories, looking back as an adult "the biggest lie, the least defensible logically, ethically, or morally; and it's inescapable for a writer attempting to create an artistically coherent work" (p.195)
I found Judith Harris's essay is the most readable - informative while defending Olds against Glück. I liked Carol Muske-Dukes' too. She writes "The last line of [Ariel] is "Fixed stars govern a life." Plath's own version ended with the visionary "bee" poems, and the last line of her book would have read, "The bees are flying. They taste the Spring."" (p.289)
There was little unexpected about the morality of being confessional about others. "Intention seems to be crucial in what one divulges about others. Are you willing first of all to divulge as much about yourself as you are about others? Are you able to realistically examine your motives? Are you trying to be the hero or are you trying to educate yourself? ... I often think the true nonconsensual participant on one's writing is some part of oneself that resists being revealed, like some secret inner personality" - Robin Hemley, Nonconcensensual Nonfiction: Writing About Those Who Don't Want to Be Written About
Here's a list of snippets -
- "Milton never wrote a poem about his mother ... or any other relative ... not even a sonnet about his daughters ... if we started with Augustine's Confessions (c.400), we could traverse the next 1,365 years with hardly an egotistical bump in the road until ... Rousseau ... It is with Wordsworth that all this changes" (p.81), Billy Collins
- "Our relationship with literature has long been a mix of the clinical and the passionate. We tend to go public with the clinical while keeping our passionate attachments to ourselves " (p.90), Billy Collins
- "current wisdom tells us that a poem must be true to itself, not to the facts." (p.88), Billy Collins
- "Archetype is the machinery through which autobiography achieves something larger than the single life; and autobiography is the means by which archetypes are renewed" (p.105), Stanley Plumley
- "Language poetry, notwithstanding the political posturing of its advocates, seems to me politically vacuous not only because of its captious repartee, and its systematic abandonment of the lyric "I", but because it denies that the morally responsible human subject is even theoretically possible" (p.319), Alice Ostriker
- "I would feel more comfortable with persona poems if each poem would in same way advise me that the experience presented may not be the poet's own" (p.159), Ted Kooser
- "The background of confessionalism is one of a convergence of anxieties shared by an entire population shaken by Word War II, and by the individual's dissociation from some of the values - religious, social, and moral - he or she once relied upon for personal stability." (p.260), Judith Harris
- "A novel, if it is to be convincing, must share characteristics with the world we live in. Its people must act in ways we recognise as human, and do so in places and with objects that seem believable. We are better prepared for reading fiction because most of what it tells us is already known. In a poem most of what is said is neither known nor unknown. The world of things or the world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually fades into the background. It is as if the poem were replacing that world as a way of establishing its own primacy, oddly asserting itself over the world" Mark Strand, The New York Times Book Reviews, 15th Sep, 1991, p.36
- "Greek lyric poets did not aim to make themselves interesting by their peculiar sensibilities, but sought rather to demonstrate the general and the basic by the example of themselves" - Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, 1962 p.151
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