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Self-Suspicion
I recently read the journalist Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The much bruited hook is how did two American Jewish lesbians survive in Vichy France during WWII. The answer is that they were protected by the collaborator Bernard Fay, about whom they may not have known much in terms of his responsibility for the suffering and deaths of a number of people—but people choose not to know what they don’t want to know. There’s also a bit on Stein’s and Toklas’ possibly S&M-ish sexual relationship which doesn’t turn out to be very interesting (as sex lives of other people generally, and disappointingly, do not.) I think Malcolm tries to dislike Stein and to like Toklas, and fails on both counts.
A few years ago I read Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about books on Sylvia Plath. In both books, the Plath and the Stein, there is more interest in Malcolm’s journey in trying to understand her subject than there is in what she finds out. Both are popularized metabiography, both are good smart easy reads. Those concerned about “I” in poems might be interested in Malcolm.
One of the silliest ways journalists go about pretending to objectivity is to avoid using the pronoun, as if doing so makes them able to renounce subjectivity. This is similar to how poets who avoid “I” often fill their poems with so much self that one feels one is (I feel I am) simply reading the same old confessional lyric in new clothes; these poets’ avoidance of “I” seems a dutifully automatic retreading of ground their teachers first cleared because they felt some urgency about what they were doing.
In the books on Stein/Toklas and Plath, Malcolm wants to get at the truth of the matter and knows she can’t. She doesn’t want her quest to intrude on her subject, and she also doesn’t want to pretend she is a squeaky-clean window through which one can see the truth about Gertrude Stein. She’s self-suspicious, though not terminally so, and she allows for irony and contradiction to coexist with a quite sincere desire for discovery. She strikes a nice balance.
On the other hand, excessive balance itself can seem a bit slick. I’m kind of hoping Malcolm’s next book, whatever it may be, will enact its ironies of discovery in a new way. Self-suspicion eventually comes to seem like an act.
Posted in Books, Group Blog on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 by Daisy Fried.
Comments (8)
The ‘Collective-I’.
The attempts to assume objectivity in writing is an old issue. The American author Henry Thoreau reminded us that behind any statement there is the ‘I’ who puts forwards the statement. While many critics try to be ‘objective’ by eliminating the pronoun, they cannot eliminate the ‘I’ which makes up their personality, their knowledge, and the way they write. Even science, to include mathematics, depends much on subjectivity.
Recently I was interested in comparing the ways that scientists are inspired with the ways that poets are inspired. I asked a science teacher what is so unique in Einstein’s famous formula E=MC2. While I consider that formula a beautiful poem, I wanted to know why it is so precious for scientists. After all, I though, if MC2 means Energy, and E stands for Energy, so in effect we are saying that E=E, i.e. energy equals energy. So what?
To my delight, the teacher answered that it is not the information that is fascinating in that formula because indeed we all know that energy equals energy. What’s important in that formula is the new way that we look at energy. Einstein opened our eyes to a new perspective, in which we explore energy through matter and velocity of light. Seeing energy through different perspective is a gift from Einstein, which he came about through opening his own eyes. No math formula; no ‘truth’ out there; no scientific ‘evidence’ could have brought Einstein to his observation. It was only his unique personality and his objective emotions that opened the path through which he could see reality with fresh eyes.
Looking at reality through subjective and fresh eyes is the gift that poets share. And it is always the ‘I’ that speaks though them, not because that ‘I’ is better than anyone else, but simply because that ‘I’ is observant, non conformist, and is eager to share with others some mysteries about life.
As such, it is not an individual selective ‘I’, but rather a sharing ‘collective-I’.
Gil Dekel,
PhD Student, Art, Design and Media, Portsmouth University, UK.
http://www.poeticmind.co.uk
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Gil – Great observations regarding the ‘I’ behind all creativity.
I have written many first person poems, and the label of confessional intrigues me. Daisy’s post brings about two methods for communicating the self in a poem: The use of the ‘I’ when including the self in a poem, and the deliberate exclusion of the ‘I’ when including the self in a poem.
Another use of the ‘I’ in poetry is the introduction of a self that is not the author. Looking at this from the perspective of Gil’s post, it would be the author using their personal perspective to try to capture the perspective of another individual in the first person voice.
It seems like we agree that the author’s perspective cannot be left out of a poem, regardless of whether or not the pronoun is used. My next question becomes, what is a confessional poem?
If I write from my perspective with the personal pronoun, I could be considered confessional.
If I write from my perspective without using the personal pronoun, I could be considered confessional.
If I write from another person’s perspective using the personal pronoun, I could be considered confessional because the reader cannot always distinguish the author’s perspective from another.
I may not be looking at this correctly, but it seems that all poems are in a way confessional, and it is not the personal pronoun that defines the poem.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the term “confessional poetry” comes from a 1959 review of Lowell’s Life Studies by M.L. Rosenthal which begins: “Emily Dickinson once called publication ‘the auction of the mind.’ Robert Lowell seems to regard it more as soul’s therapy. The use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day.” He also says that “Whitman took American poetry to the very edge of the confessional in his Calamus poems.” He describes how earlier in Am. po, “a certain indirection” masked the poet’s “actual face and psyche” – and objects that “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”
Frank Bidart addresses this in the “Afterword” to Lowell’s Collected Poems, saying that Lowell winced at the term, which implies (in Bidart’s words) “helpless outpouring, secrets whispered with an artlessness that is their badge of authenticity, the uncontrolled admission…” Or worse, confession of other people’s problems, “litanies of victimization.” But for Bidart and Lowell, “confession” has a more honorable meaning, along the lines of St. Augustine, dealing with events “crucial in the making of the soul,” rather than “simply self-laceration… cover self-promotion or complaint.”
For his part, Lowell complained that his poems were never intended to be seen as “factually true.” He felt that because experience is in flux, artistry and invention are more important than autobiography; for him “autobiography” just means that when people read a poem, they say “this is true,” that, for example, a reader would believe that “he was getting the real Robert Lowell.” So, his reply is that he invented a character in his poem, “Robert Lowell,” but that art is a construction reflecting a kind of accuracy that, as Bidart put it, “is not the accuracy of fact.”
Dunno how that might affect your deployment of personal pronouns.
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Er, that should read “covert self-promotion.”
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Thanks Don. I knew of the origins of the term confessional, but I had not read the rebuttals by Lowell and Bidart. Would you agree that the term confessional has grown beyond those discussions into a label for many poems that are autobiographical in nature? In addition, the label had negative connotations? For example, in Daisy’s post, the following points hint at the negative connotations of the term confessional:
“This is similar to how poets who avoid “I” often fill their poems with so much self that one feels one is (I feel I am) simply reading the same old confessional lyric in new clothes;”
“She’s self-suspicious, though not terminally so, and she allows for irony and contradiction to coexist with a quite sincere desire for discovery. She strikes a nice balance.”
“On the other hand, excessive balance itself can seem a bit slick…Self-suspicion eventually comes to seem like an act.”
Also, the following quote from Marilyn Chin:
“Poetry has moved to the suburbs. Current literary journals contain a lot of about the mythology of the self. I suppose this was first inspired by the confessional poets. American poets have veered away from the democratic self as a representative and national self. Their poems are self-centered, short sighted; they don’t extend to larger concerns.”
But as Gil pointed out in his post, and I agree, all creativity begins with the individual perspective (or the collection of individual perspectives). My question then becomes, is labelling poetry as confessional, even if it has autobiographical roots, a short-cut to thinking about its connections to “larger concerns”? Too many assumptions must be made about the author her/himself in order to call a poem confessional. My point is that using the presence or lack of the personal pronoun, and/or assuming the autobiographic roots of a poem, puts the reader/critic in danger of overlooking a poem’s wider connotations.
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Back to the individual.
Marty says: “…using the presence or lack of the personal pronoun, and/or assuming the autobiographic roots of a poem, puts the reader/critic in danger of overlooking a poem’s wider connotations.”
This I think is important point, Marty. But I am not sure if the reader looks for the poem’s wider connotations to begin with. I think the reader ‘gets’ from the poem one thing – the reader’s own associations and emotions evoked. The reader may imagine that the poet ‘gave’ him those emotions, yet the poet probably meant something else to what the reader receives.
I recently interviewed a UK poet, Clive Wilmer, who introduced me to the 19th century poet Robert Browning. Browning was famous of being obscure. Somebody wrote to him and said that his poetry is interesting, but why can it not be easier to understand? Browning replied that he has a duty to what ‘exists’, to the nature of reality; the reader’s business is to listen if he wishes to, but the poet’s duty is to what happens.
So, how do bring back poetry from its collective-position, to the individual?
Gil Dekel,
PhD Student, Art, Design and Media, Portsmouth University, UK.
http://www.poeticmind.co.uk
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I think I was using shorthand, Marty. I didn’t really mean to disparage confessional poetry. I mean, I’m always happy to take unfair swipes at any school of poetry. But the best confessional poetry is, of course, some of the best poetry around. And the worst confessional poem is no worse than any other sort of bad poem, though it’s true, the fact that a standard-issue confessional poem can be easily “gotten” puts it at a disadvantage to the average lousy opaque poem. Anyway, it’s too bad that the confessionals often get excluded from avant garde narratives of 20th Century poetic movements; after all, they were extremely radical. Daisy
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Marty, I generally have trouble with labels, including “confessional” (and “language” and “post-avant”), which don’t seem to be useful unless the idea is to paint a lot of poets – and a lot of poems – with the proverbial broad brush. That notwithstanding, I like Daisy’s intriguing point that some of the poets’ exclusion from some narratives of 20th c. poetic movements is remiss. My own favorite (but possibly inapt) examples are Lowell’s “The Mills of the Kavanaghs” and “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” which resemble nothing so much as some of Bernstein’s more recent rhymed work (though by nature Lowell is far more self-solemn than Charles could ever be!); these are poems that were judged to have been failures, and so are virtually never read – an index, in fact, of how peculiar they were, and are. In the end, as Bunting says, poems stand apart from their makers, which renders the poets somewhat anonymous anyway… but that, I fear, is a matter for the thread on “intentionality!”
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