A good while ago, I took a poetry course that broke me from writing poetry ever again.
It happens.
The one true thing I learned from the course was not actually about poetry, it was about living as a writer in general.
The leader of the workshop (dare I call him "teacher") said that he thought my work was intentionally obtuse because he thought that I was hiding behind obscure language and esoteric metareference. Good call.
If you have read my introductory blog, you know that I have good reason to hide.
A year after the course ended, the older poet showed me one of his poems, about a married couple whose life was analogous to a tornado in a domestic bowl. I had a flash of something and I asked him something like, "Is everything OK at home?" He shrugged momentarily and told me that, for him, poetry was nothing more than "words on a page." He insisted that in order to write well, we all have to extract ourselves from our work, that we cannot incorporate the emotional hullabaloo that makes us human beings (and interested in poetry to begin with). I think what he was trying to say was, "I don't want to live with the fear that someone will know me or know my fears after having read something intimately crafted from the leas of my soul, therefore I will disavow any *real* connection to my work and I will insist that every syllable is fictional craftwork: 'words on a page'."
Now I am totally transferring. But, if that wasn't what he was trying to say, I often wonder why he automatically thought my work represented my need to "hide."
We are fundamentally and intimately connected to our work. Anyone who says otherwise is either a hack or a bullshitter.
Oh, sure, I will admit that some non-fictional occurrences become fictionalized, become allegory, become metaphor. But if they work as craft, they are, on some level, true. If they are false or falsely represented, they do not work as craft.
I mean, once I wrote a bit where my mulletted, live-action-roll-playing-game playing, lesbian first grad school officemate became a whoreish tech-geek just so I could work in some fabulously paraphrased dialogue without committing libel. This was the "bit" that taught me to always change names. Always, always, always. Even if it's an outlandish fictionalization, do not use real names. You never know who is going to breach your firewall. (This is not a metaphor.)
But back to poetry and "words on a page." This moment of epiphany has stuck with me more than just about any moment in my academic life. For a few reasons. Most obviously because I learned that some teachers lie to students with great ease. This is often aided by the fact that many men in positions of authority lie to women with great ease. But, in this particular case, I think I saw a man lying to himself. He showed me that still unpublished poem unsolicited because he wanted me to *see* something. And once I did, he regretted it and maybe even resented me for it.
Less obviously because I left his office in tears. The conversation turned to my home-life and the supposition that I was transferring onto the poem. This led to my admission that my husband and I were filing for divorce. Again. (We live on the far end of the cul-du-sac of divorce, we drive round and round but never seem to get out. Now that I think of it, it is kinda like a tornado.) It wasn't the talk about divorce that made me cry; it was his spontaneous and absolute tenderness. This man had always been my guide to calculated detachment, a paragon of aloofness. But he wrapped me in his arms and expressed a dam-breaking understanding which - of course - left me a puddle of something-needing-Kleenex-and-a-wubbie and left him needing to clean mascara off of his tweedy jacket.
My husband and I did not divorce. The poet and I sort-of broke ties. Then later we really broke ties (which is, ironically, not unrelated to my having not divorced my husband).
Like the snakes and Billy Ray Cyrus references I told you about earlier, this moment in my life keeps coming back to me. As I write, I try to separate what are simply "words on a page" and what are real sentiments. For me, the answer is: "everything is both."
So, for your reading enjoyment, I offer the last poem I ever wrote. This was the straw that broke the poet's back. And the piece that ties all the bifurcations of this narrative together. This is both absolutely, positively, simply "words on a page" and it is simultaneously absolutely, positively not.
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Lost, in Translation
In the Vieux Carré we should feel grown up.
Nevertheless - - we hid
from moments when we couldn’t tie our shoes,
or roller-skate,
or waltz, and we pretended to be
deliberate boogeymen
each under the others’ beds.
I want a drink.
It was dark outside and newborns
were debating Nietzsche and Twain.
I disagreed.
But kept it to myself.
I walked Bourbon Street with you
in my incredulous heels,
my mischievous hair
stealing the wind (oddly cold this year)
catching errant whiskers of your face.
Benignly intimate, I fed you duck from my fork,
like Uptown lagniappe, it was unexpected.
We were looking for alligators in a kiosk
on Decatur and Dumaine
when I realized that I hadn’t thought of it yet.
You were a tourist on a visa;
I didn’t imagine you
as someone to love until
(I hate to be alone) I dropped my guard.
Then a deluge, a broken levee in my heart, oh, no! the cliché!
Allegory for falling in love in New Orleans
can be trite. Painfully trite. Painful.
Tragic confidences and the throes of
intention, of loss, of stupidity
made me live the life I should have seen coming.
The nightlight stayed on to keep
shadows away,
shadows away, shadows away
while we fell together, together, together - -
and I fell. Alone.
Terrified. Brazen. Awkward.
Mortal-guilty.
A living creature,
exotic as a school bus.
The morning that brought bignets and café au lait
found me mistakenly undisheveled.
I should have been more demonstrative.
I should never hold back.
And I should hold back more.
Perfunctory haunts me.
There must have been a language gap.
I was speaking English and you
were speaking English when
you said, something about us.
It wasn’t the words, I’d heard those before.
But I didn't hear what your eyes were saying
until it was too late and the pie lady sang.
Are you thinking nothing of it?
Or wishing you’d foregone Jackson Square,
alligator sausage cheesecake, not-quite-pints,
hurricanes, all turning unproductively?
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