William Hazlitt called poetry, “the language of the imagination; and the
imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in
themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an
infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power.”
John Keats, who was a fan
of Hazlitt’s lectures, took it one step further describing a Chameleon poet, a
poet who must relinquish the self when contemplating an object or person, so the
imagination may speak from a place in-between individual consciousness and the phenomenal
world; in fact, a place where the “I” can become an “Eye” as the American poet
Reginald Shepard once put it.
But
this is not to say the singular first-person “I” does not make a good starting point for the writing of poetry for what houses our imaginations if not our
insufferable selves? Things semi-real need “a greeting of the spirit to make them wholly exist” says Keats, which really is his cute way of saying we are
stuck with ourselves. We may be the gods of the worlds we create, but we are
still captives of our bodies, and of the day-to-day pressures of a shared reality.
Yes, damn the ego, by all means, but to throw out the self entirely is to risk
a poetry barren of any emotional complexities, any human apprehension, any lived
experience, making it a mere inert puzzle or ersatz scheme. It courts anorexia
of the soul.
For
at least the past dozen years, I've read how the use of the first
person lyric leads only to a pauper’s graveyard of easy cliches, unrestrained
sentimentality and amped-up confessionalism. A cave of self-delusion and egocentrism.
It’s an idea that has gained intractable popularity among younger poets for whom connotative sloppiness has become a trademark or the style du jour. In her
essay entitled “Little Death of the Self” which appeared in American Poetry Review, Marianne Boruch explores the growing impatience surrounding lyric poetry
written in the first person singular:
But
there’s a noticeable shift from this approach, a growing wish in contemporary
poetry to discredit or fracture, even rub out forever just such a speaker, a
new impatience with genuinely lived experience as the source of poetry. Or it’s
a need to remain as hidden as possible. Or a desire for deeper play and
outright accident, to e-invent, to flarf, cleverly collaging bits from the web
to leave behind the tired old real and potentially embarassing—read: sentimental—self as speaker. Whatever
the reasons, I hear and overhear this sometimes: I want to kill the “I” in my
poem—as if that could move any mountain. And it’s earnest, this wish, and
somehow seductive though it seems like a Mobius strip, doesn’t it? Or the
serpent eating its own tail since the most convincing element in such an assertion
lies at the very start and keeps sticking.
After all, who
wants with such passion to do in that “I”? I
do I do I do.….( p.51 May/June 2011 Vol. 40/No. 3)
As
someone who reads poetry for its affective nature—its ability to teach us how
to live, to be a presence in the world, to connect us with a broader, more
universal human experience—it saddens me to see the first person lyric always
equated with mere confessionalism. This is frustrating because we intuit the world through the “I”, but the
world also brings that “I” into being, from the hodgepodge of sensory perception. It is a symbiotic relationship that
has all but been forgotten, and to forget is to despair.
And
why the assumption the “I” in a poem is always the poet speaking? Audiences are
perfectly willing to understand the teenage narrator in a novel based on an author’s autobiographical experiences in Guatemala is a fictional character, but
seem less inclined to do so when reading a book of poems. Philip Levine has many
poems where the speaker mentions a sister, and yet Levine has no sister. For
myself, I have written many poems based on places I have lived, and people I have
known, but if readers were to believe they knew who I was based solely on a
reading of my books, they would be in for a rude awakening. I have never been
to confessional as I am not Catholic, and I have never gone to school with
boys whose fathers were ship-builders, these being just two prime examples that
come to mind from my last book.
I
suppose what I'm trying to say is the first person lyric is not always private reportage or easy anecdote, for there is a
difference between confessionalism and the subjective, and in all honesty, who knows truly what that “I” stands for in a
poem given how conditional our lives are. If I knew, I wouldn’t write. As John Koethe has stated, ”I and here and now are ever present, but they vanish in the act of apprehension, as a poem turns into language as you write it down.” Maybe the first person lyric is a broken conduit for many young practising poets, but for me it is not so.
Poems
are written by real people. Not robots. If a poem does not feel as if it were
written by a flesh and blood person, even if that person is only off to the
side somewhere in the poem, I will never connect with it. How else to bridge one’s
own imagination with another’s except through the melting pot of the “I”?
That it has to be more than a lonely wallflower standing off in a corner obsessing about the past goes without saying. It has to touch upon the collective
unconscious of all people, an underworld of wailing voices, while, paradoxically, speaking from the firm ground of an individual lived experience. If the “I” in a poem
dreams, it dreams chameleon dreams.
