Welcome to The Tangled Branch!  Join us.

The "N"

Discussions, Rants & Resources
Post Reply
AlienFlower
Posts: 475
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 9:32 am
Contact:

The "N"

Post by AlienFlower » Sat Oct 16, 2021 2:44 pm

Hi folks,

Am I wrong in thinking that our general assumption on this forum is that poems posted here are personal/true experiences/thoughts? If so, do you see that as desirable? For example, perhaps it helps to build community and stimulate writing.

Jackie

User avatar
Qwerty
Posts: 34
Joined: Wed Jan 27, 2021 12:07 pm
Location: Southern California

Re: The "N"

Post by Qwerty » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:04 pm

Jackie,

I don't know what most of the poets here assume but perhaps the following will be helpful.

The persona (speaker) in a poem can be but isn't necessarily the poet. Either way, the power of the poem lives in how it affects the reader, not who the speaker is. It's similar to the difference between a memoir or personal essay that merely tells a story about the author instead of through the author. The latter approach empowers the reader to see its universal appeal, its reflection of human nature. I hasten to say that prose is typically about something, whereas poetry IS something. Why? Because a good poem surpasses a mere sum of its parts by merging how it means with what it means.

And I can't resist the temptation to quote Sam Keene, who wrote...

Few of us know the fantastic characters, emotions, perceptions and demons that inhabit the theaters that are our minds. We are content to tell a single story, to construct a consistent character, to fix our identity. We are thus defined more by neglected possibilities than by realized ones. We rehearse and repeat a monotonous monologue while heroes and villains, saints and madmen, ascetics and libertines wait in the wings for a chance to seize the stage and run wild. Be all those characters who wander around in your head. Discover your many selves. You become authentically public only by going to the depths of your private."

Bill
https://www.ebooks-by-bill.com
Words go together in zillions of ways. Some ways go shallow and some ways go deep. ~ James Dickey

User avatar
Tracy Mitchell
Posts: 3179
Joined: Sun Jan 07, 2018 3:58 pm

Re: The "N"

Post by Tracy Mitchell » Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:49 pm

Excellent question, Jackie, and excellent response, Querty. 

An effective poem will engender some response in a reader -- the sense of sharing an experience, the feeling of an emotion, an  ah-hah moment, or some similar psychic reaction.  A writer can't do that without a genuineness in the heart of the narrative.  But historical accuracy plays no part in that.  A poet is reaching to communicate the larger truths, and that may be undermined by fidelity to historical details.   The assumption should never be made that the Narrator IS the author.  It is of utmost importance the story the Narrator tells, it is irrelevant whose story that originally was, because it is the author who brings it to live in the form presented.  If I experience some mix of despair, joy, guilt and regret by recalling a serious injury suffered by my aunt from which she ultimately recovers, it is possible for me to come a that mix of emotions from unique directions.  For example,  rather than my aunt surviving, perhaps I can get closer to the heart of the experience by making her my sister who doesn't survive.  Or writing in the first person, so that it is I who don't survive.  

In Traveling Through the Dark, William Stafford creates a moral dilemma which is unexpectedly thrust on the Narrator, and is resolved at the end of the poem.  It is a profound and unsettling poem, which has much to say about the human experience.  As he points out in an essay about the poem, it is certainly not factually accurate, but then, if it were, it would not be much of a poem.

We strive to right good poems, not historically precise journal entries. 

To your larger question, Jackie, I think the more fidelity I show to the heart of a poem, the more I reveal of myself, even though I am not giving you my personal biography.  I think that may be what could bind us as a writers' community.  Besides, there are  opportunities for chit-chat time apart from the substance of the poetry work.

Just my view, hope I was clear.

Cheers.

Tracy 

Dave
Posts: 1991
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 9:07 am

Re: The "N"

Post by Dave » Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:46 am

These were excellent answers to an excellent question. I will keep my answer short and speak only for myself. I see all production as fiction including so called biographies and autobiographies. I often write poems that contain elements of my own life history but as the word history suggests they then form part of a story. In the worst case it annoys me when critics and audiences insist that songs or poems are autobiographical simply because they use elements of real events.

Art hopefully moves people intellectually and emotionally but does not require a link to reality. It has come so far that people can cry to music written by computers using algorithms. The internet is fiction, books are fiction, history is fiction, even memory is fiction
Dave
 

User avatar
Tracy Mitchell
Posts: 3179
Joined: Sun Jan 07, 2018 3:58 pm

Re: The "N"

Post by Tracy Mitchell » Wed Oct 20, 2021 10:46 am

Huh.  I just ran across this:

My dad always bragged that his father, my grandpapa Mitch, walked barefoot from Pontotoc, Oklahoma, to Chicago, Illinois.  there he got a job as office clerk, and soon became president of the Armstrong Paint and Varnish Company.  Nowadays my dad says it's true his father didn't like shoes, but admits he didn't walk to Chicago barefoot;  he took the train with his shoes on.  My father was making up this barefoot detail.  But he wasn't actually lying, he was telling the truth about his feelings of admiration for his father. 
. . . .
I need accurate description of what I see to bring the reader with me.  Then, with all of the particulars in place, I can lie all I want to express my feelings.  I can be intense and far-out.  I can fly, go to the underworld, become blackness itself or a volcano or lace, as long as I'm expressing the emotional truth.

     --- Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, Poemcrazy

AlienFlower
Posts: 475
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 9:32 am
Contact:

Re: The "N"

Post by AlienFlower » Sun Oct 31, 2021 11:45 am

What magnificent answers! If I were losing faith in poetry I'd have regained it by now!

Often on this forum, authors let us know where a poem sprang from. I like the idea that although something has to ground a poem, in the end that thing may only be emotional validity.

Best to all
Jackie

User avatar
Dansinger
Posts: 865
Joined: Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:29 am

Re: The "N"

Post by Dansinger » Thu Nov 25, 2021 10:43 am

I can only speak for myself.

Sometimes, the N and I are the same. Sometimes we are similar, but not the same. And then there's those times when the N and I are nothing alike.
 

Post Reply