I've been thinking a good deal about my friend Baron's comment "a poet has the right to her rage," a sentence that I can't seem to relinquish. What I think he's telling me is that, first, even though a poet has the right to her rage, her rage may not have a right to the poem. For instance, the murders of Amy, Coty, and Monica continue to fire my rage, which in turn both hounds me and taunts me. In other words, rage dares me to write and then forces me to see that what I've written is not a poem but a mouthful of nails.
A mouthful of nails is not a poem, although a poem can be a mouthful of nails, which leads me to a second thought about Baron's sentence: a poet has the right to her rage. Am I raging about these murders as a poet or as a friend? Can I do both simultaneously? Or am I not pressing the poet to take precedence? Here's where poetry becomes cruel: not because it undertakes horrendous subjects but because the poet must step into the role of manipulator . . . in this case, while excoriating the terrible manipulations of "the real story." I wrote about this dilemma in Tracing Paradise, in the chapter titled "Killing Ruthie," and I continue to ponder and worry over it.
But here's a third thought: a poet has the right to her rage, yet the frame of that rage can be reimagined. And this is why I'm on the cusp of introducing the story into the western Pennsylvania poems. Something very different will happen when I shift these present-tense angers into an entirely new time and environment. At the very least I will be a poet first rather than a griever first.
2 comments:
I remember a professor telling our class once that it was essential to write using what we know, not what we haven't experienced in some way. One example he gave addressed the questions of whether and how a poet who had not been in a Nazi concentration camp had the right to write a poem about that subject. That's a rather extreme example but his point was about using experience and knowledge as well as reimagining it in a way that the poem speaks truth. He did not mean one had to literally experience something to be able to write about it. The discussion was instructive.
Your post is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I think all of us who write struggle with the questions you raise. I look forward to reading others' comments here.
Your third thought, wherein you write"yet the frame of that rage can be reimagined" is a marvelous epiphany. Your western Pennsylvania poems are destined, I feel, to be so much more than a mouthful of nails as you return, again and again, to those precious hours alone, when your friends were still alive. Being on the cusp of something in this way of life and remembrance is amazing.
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