“That Ruthless”: Guts and Reconciliation in the Lyric of Experience

“If I wanted to be analyzed, I would have hired a therapist,” says a fictional poet in protest on day three of a fictional two-week long poetry workshop retreat. The workshop has just finished discussing his poem, the one about the hopelessly disadvantaged children whom the speaker of the poem graciously, and at considerable inconvenience, agrees to mentor twice monthly. The speaker describes the children in terms that distinguish them merely as types, statistical casualties of neglect. One child shrinks from the touch of others, another is a “whirlwind” of hyperactivity. The speaker himself is portrayed in glowing terms demonstrative of bourgeois achievement and noblesse oblige. The speaker references his Swedish station wagon; he references the burden of his mortgage; the orthodontia of his own private school-educated children which he must finance in addition to the emotional expenditures of caring for the “castaways” he encounters through this volunteer work of his; these trappings of the middle class which he has been able to come by despite the obstacles he had to face while growing up, obstacles which explain his present generosity of spirit. The poem is so clearly an act of self-staging that the poet, let’s call him “Greg,” uses the first person singular during workshop when discussing actions belonging to the poem’s speaker. And yet, when his fellow workshop participants begin to interrogate the speaker’s motives in the poem, Greg bristles, insisting that the speaker is not the focus of the poem. Rather, Greg argues, the poem directs our attention in a way that encourages us to care more intensely for the fate of children like “those children” depicted.

But Greg’s fellow workshoppers aren’t buying it. They know “those children” are extras on the set. They are place-keepers. The workshop instructor begins to ask, as instructors do, what’s really at stake in the poem, suggesting that the poem is most charged, most evocative, at the point where the glance momentarily turns inward and reflects on the speaker’s own vulnerable childhood. The poet storms out of the workshop shouting, “This is not about me!”

Our fictional poet is correct. The workshop discussion must concern the poem, not the character of the poet. But once Greg has cleared his head and returned to the workshop table, he acknowledges the lyric of experience begs emotional immediacy that exposes poet-as-speaker (and reader) to past trauma as well as past joy. A poet cannot expose him or herself to such intense conditions vicariously. The poem this draft is leading to will bat down an entire hive of new poems, all more personal than the draft just discussed, each bearing its own flickering shard of energy.

Many workshop instructors stress that the speaker and the poet are not one and the same in an effort to depersonalize the workshop and minimize the stress of critiquing poems that deal with such deeply felt remembrances. It is an understandable impulse to want to address the superficial mechanics of a poem rather than address the uncomfortable revelations yielded by close reading. But these are, alas, the wrong reasons to distinguish poet and speaker. Trepidation, which is too often passed off or excused as sensitivity, enables low standards of critique.

The necessary and right reason we should insist on the distinction between poet and speaker is that the speaker is always a projection—one we may empathize with a great deal, but a projection nonetheless. As poets we learn to distinguish our selfhood from that other flawed expression of humanity conveyed by the language we place on the page. But we also recognize that how we render the flawed humanity on the page is a correlative of our capacity for rigorous self-examination. It is through the willingness to bear witness to ourselves that we can even begin to approach the objectivity needed to craft a compelling speaker.

At the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop we must place the same demands on the lyric of experience as we place on the persona poem. In the theater of...