Today at my FRV meeting I had discussion about poetry personas. Someone, without thinking about it, I'm sure, assumed "facts" about a person's life based on smashing two of their poems together to draw a conclusion. Okay, so a lot of poets actually do write about their lives. They've got to have something to draw on. But it's very annoying to me when people make these assumptions (as I ranted about in this post) . So I got loud. I think I scared some of the people on the board.
It's possible for someone to create prose without having this difficulty about persona/writer confusion. Why is poetry like this?
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5 comments:
Are you just venting, or did you actually want to open discussion on that question? Either way, I guess, here's my two cents:
Poetry gives the impression of being more immediate than prose. It's shorter, more compact, and might seem to have been written more quickly than, say, a short story or novel. I think that's one reason people sometimes assume that a poem is a record of the poet's emotional state. It's an unfair assumption for more than one reason, but I think because prose (supposedly) takes longer to write, it's considered more "rational" and distant from its author's emotions. Kathy Acker's readers constantly tangled her up with her speakers, and she wrote prose. But it was prose that read like it had been written quickly, in one long breath.
But whatever. I feel your frustration. Sorry my pedantry can't actually help.
No, thank you very much Amber. I was venting my frusturations somewhat, but it's nice to hear a well reason commentary on why people cannot separate a poet and their work. I want to do something to change that perception because even people who are well educated in literature tend to make this leap. I guess I don't really know what to do except argue with anyone who seems to be making some kind of irrational inductive leap in terms of the narrator of a poem.
we were talking about something related just yesterday in my poetry group... about how hard it must be to teach intro poetry classes to people who'd never had them before because (most) everyone comes into poetry thinking that it must be personal and writes about the subjects on which their hearts are raw (love, loss, incest, rape, desired matricide, depression, twinkies). and so you end up with poems like:
LONE
i am THE only star in
the WHOLE sky
she was with another
star with her tongue
in HIS throat and
now only the COLD
space comforts me
like thousands of pins
and I AM ALONE and
lonely and hurt
and shamed and filled,
also, with a strange
hunger for twinkies
all this because people (even otherwise well educated people) still think that poems must be intensely personal and explicit (not in terms of sex or profanity, per se, but just explicit in their message) and so they write bad poems about how their fembot is off with another manbot and how that makes them feel in the rawest terms and images they can find because, unfortunately, they never got past the idea of poetry best exemplified by high school 'goth' kids.
People think that poems are personal (they can be) and that they are the most personal (nope, save that for ye olde diare) and will not think otherwise until properly educated.
I think that people view poetry as a form of high art. In so doing they associate good poetry with giftedness. A gift is seen as something that is unique or special that comes from inside the artist.
I don't know if that actually makes sense or if it's just meaninglessly chained logic.
No, Ivory what you are saying sounds pretty good.
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