The Audacity of Self-Consciousness

When a friend criticized a poem I was drafting by saying I was “trying too hard,” and that the poem felt “self-conscious,” I took her to mean she thought I was making the fact of the poem’s constructedness too apparent, and that my investment—my desire-formaking—should not be so evident. She used the word sprezzatura, and said she wanted the poem to sound more “natural.” This seemed to be a fair critique. After all, I respect her judgment a great deal. So I tried staging the poem to make it appear like something that happened accidentally, while I wasn’t looking. I found myself pretending I was writing absentmindedly. I found myself trying very hard to sound “natural.” I tried humming while I worked. Of course, this made me all the more self-conscious, and I began to question what it was I was pursuing, and whom it was (in terms of readership) this pretense of naturalness was supposed to please.

We have inherited catchphrases like “negative capability,” “disinterestedness,” “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and “the continual extinction of personality,” and for the most part they’ve served us well as guideposts toward an unaffected or “natural” voice. But these terms come out of the fundamentally small-r romantic belief that the voice scrubbed of overt consciousness should be the voice of poetic sincerity. No poet can deny the idiosyncrasies of his voice, but in pursuing this manner of self-effacement, I’m afraid we ignore how we are replacing one performance of the self for another, more authoritative mask. Readers like to know that behind the poem there is someone who cares about the work profoundly, but poets too often emulate a particular tone or voice in order to convince the reader of their care and solemnity. And what is the voice poets tend to adopt? Too often this is a voice that could be attributed to any number of band aid-colored mannequins in a department store window, trading in the most common notions of beauty and prestige.

I’m reminded of the vagrancy laws—the so-called “ugly laws” of the last century that allowed people to be jailed for their conspicuous and distasteful appearance. If, for example, someone was unhygienic or foul smelling, or if someone was disabled in a way that called attention to their “misfortune,” under these laws there would be grounds for removing that person from public view. Such laws were in effect until the 1970s in some states. At stake was not merely an aesthetic concern, but the reminder of social inequality and the failure to provide adequate care and support for all citizens. What was (and is) aesthetically acceptable on our streets and boulevards was that which is politely agreeable, well mannered—that which affirms the dominant norm. Taste, a function of preference, is political. Like it or not this principle applies in American poetry. For what is a “natural voice” but one that does not diverge from the familiar in any way that would call attention to the poet’s social, historical, and cultural difference? If we think of the “natural voice” as a tonal frequency unmarked by the effects of injustice or poverty or abuse, for example; if we think of the “natural voice” as aspiring to a clinically authorized expression of sincerity, it is hard to ignore how that voice must be profoundly constructed and decidedly unnatural—a voice that affirms the authority that resides at the intersection of white and male. I wonder then, if when we criticize a poem for self-consciously calling attention to its maker, that is, if when we ask a poem to sound more “natural,” we are in effect asking the poet to leave the poem at the kitchen door, so to speak, and quietly go away. I wonder if what we are saying is that we like our poems fully assimilated, and if they are not, that they have the decency to perform their difference in socially acceptable ways, cleansed of all reminders of the social and political tensions that conspire to make that poem...