On Not Being A Poet (Report from the sabbatical: week two)

I’m not a poet.  I’ve been saying that most of my life, though I wrote my first poem when I was ten (a haiku, though I didn’t know at the time that’s what it was – my older sister, who had just started college, thought I had copied it from a book). Just a few weeks later, I wrote a nearly perfect quatrain (though, again, I didn’t know…).   But I’m not a poet. 

This is what I told Nicky, my grad school advisor, at the beginning of my program.  I'm not a poet, I said, and I turned in volumes of poetry to her as I went through the program.  The second reader for my Masters Program,  a respected and award-winning poet, praised  my work.  And I told him I was not a poet.   I thought of my poetry as a route to something else – as preliminary work to prepare to write prose, a form of brainstorming. Generative work, not the work.  Editors who read my short stories, and later my novels, called my writing ‘lyrical,’ and, yes, ‘poetic.’  The language of the poetry, the  rhythm of the words, drove me to write prose and tell stories.  But I was not, I am not, a poet.

I know poets – quite a few of them – some relatively famous, some still striving for more than the random publication in literary magazines.  They work hard at their craft – they study the forms, they pour over the words on the page, carefully crafting each line, choosing each word.  I’ve done that with individual poems, but it is process, not product.  So I say. 

In studying with Nicky in the MFA program, I read (along with many other works on a long and challenging reading list) many poets who inspired me – Maya Angelou, Raymond Carver, Judy Grahn,  Kay Ryan, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, Judith Barrington, Judy Grahn.   I took lines that inspired me and pasted them on the wall above my desk, finally settling on  Muriel Rukeyser’s line  “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?  The world would split open.”   I told Nicky in conference that this was what I was trying to do – split the world open with the truth.   My work then focused on the lives of women, their stories, and individual stories often began with lines of poetry scribbled in the night, page after page, until, finally, I was writing the prose story of Agnes or Theo or Rochelle or Lena, and gaining nods and encouragement from Nicky.  My final thesis was titled “The World Split Open,” and was approved as it stood by both Nicky and my second reader Mark Doty, advancing me to graduation, and also to the struggle to keep up this work on my own.

Now, years and much Life later, that struggle continues, and, as it should, my thinking has changed.  As part of my digging in during this sabbatical, I am re-reading authors who’ve inspired me – this week,  Annie Dillard’s  An American Childhood and  Margaret Atwood’s stunning Cat’s Eye, and also a collection of works by Raymond Carver, including the breathtaking story Cathedral. And I am realizing that they are all telling the same story (read Dillard and Atwood in a row, back to back, and you will come to the same conclusion).  I think Rukeyser was right, but her thinking not expansive enough – I think what is true is this:  what would happen if anyone  told the (full) truth about their life?  The world would split open.

That is not to say that I have stopped being a feminist (though I have never liked that word, and find Alice Walker’s substitute  “womanist” too awkward, and “humanist” too laden with problematic connotations).  I haven’t stopped.  I have simply found my thinking shifting, opening.  Opening is good.  I do believe that much in our social system is biased against women, people of color, and other “minority” (though hardly a minority in mathematical terms)  groups.  But I also believe that this  systematic bias damages everyone – including those privileged by it, though often the very privilege blinds them to the damage they’ve suffered.   That is the essential nature of ‘the tragic flaw,’ and is a fundamental tragedy of our modern world.  It is the reason any story that tells the full truth of a life would split the world open – the razor sharp truth of the flaw that prevents us from seeing the damage done, and causes us to continue to pursue and desire a life of further damage would cleave the world in two.  

This is also, I think, the difference between art and craft that I have so struggled to (and failed to) define for my writing group and others I've had that discussion with.  Both art and craft are necessary.  We hone our craft because we love the work - we take care with words and polish sentences and change paragraphs. We honor our the work. 

 In pursuing the art of the writer's work, we seek to split the world open, to speak the truth.  

   

My last two characters have been men – damaged, searching, and deeply flawed while still fully and beautifully human.  One of the members of my writing group, in reading a chapter from one of those pieces and commenting on it, said to me, “you write better male lead characters than your female ones.”  I’ve thought about this often in the intervening months – is that because, as the poetry of their lives unfolds on the page, I can see the tragedy of male flaws more clearly than I can my own as a woman?  Or is it because the female reader cannot see the tragedy of the flaws in my female characters?  I’ll explore that more.  In the meantime, as the stories unfold in my mind and on paper, I sit every morning with sheets of paper and scribble stacks of first-draft poetry, most of it doomed to stay first draft forever, some of it to be polished, some more to lead to pages of prose as lives unfold there, and I seek to speak the truth about those lives.  But I am not a poet.