The Case of the "Dead" Brother, Part 2

Here is the Chinese symbol for truth. Here’s more about “truth” in nonfiction and poetry: as I think about it now, it’s really poetry I’m concerned with. When nonfiction posits an “I,” we read with a measure of suspended disbelief. We believe the writer’s trying for the truth of the situation, but that there may be some invented dialogue, some stretched and conflated scenes.In memoir—in my own memoir—I’ve done that: combined elements to make a single moment that was probably several different ones. Who knows for sure? My memory isn’t that accurate. If I ask my sisters, they each have a slightly different angle and sometimes even a different story. We do the best we can. And what the reader’s reading for, what I’m reading for, is a sense that the speaker is honestly searching out the emotional truth and adhering to facts pretty much. If the memoirist were to go too far astray and I find out about it, I’d be disappointed.But in poetry, it seems to me something of a moral failure to lie. Is this silly? I guess so. In “The Prelude,” When Wordsworth is out there rowing and sees the huge peak towering between him and the stars that seems like a living thing, and rows like hell to get away, I believe this happened to him. I take it in, digest it, and it feels like a more direct infusion, let’s call it a transmission, than if it had been set within a fictional frame.Here are some of the comments I’ve gotten about this, followed by my thoughts:Anne-Marie Oomen writes: I do agree with the need for truth, especially in this culture, and for deep consideration of how truth is presented, despite its mystery. But I am wondering, you know, just curious, as to why a poem is so-often assumed “true” any more than, for instance, a short story? I’m probably shy on my literary history here (or misunderstanding the argument–more likely), but has poetry always been a “truth-telling” genre? How did it come down on the “nonfiction” side of things? Or is it simply assumed that the speaker of the poem is the poet speaking of her own experience? Or did the confessional poets lead us to this? Of course, truth be told, my questions spring in part from my self-consciousness about own collection, “Un-coded Woman.” I recently discovered some people have read it as a completely autobiographical poem series. Yikes! The speaker shares a few experiences and memories with me, but she’s not me. (I even gave her a different name.) I hope the book tells a truth, but it is not mine. So. I lied? But. But.My comment: I’m thinking of dear old anonymous’s poem, “Western Wind”. . . “Christ, that my love were in my arms / and I in my bed again.” I suspect that poetry that is spoken by “I” is likely to be taken as really an “I,” the poet, presumably. In Anne-Marie’s book, she created a fictional, narrative structure for the poems, just as I did in my book, The Devil’s Child. When the speaker in the poems is clearly not the—or a—poet, if we have half a brain, we can see that the poems are fictionalized, attempting a truth of the human heart, and maybe even a truth of how it might have been, but still, we see the scrim of the poet’s mind as it plays upon the material.Molly Spencer writes: I’m right there with Anne-Marie wondering about truth in poetry, the speaker vs. the poet. I’ve been working on a series of poems through the persona of the Mail Order Bride. I have to keep telling people they’re not about me or my life…. not quite (definitely not the mail order part!!)… but yes, they speak to experiences I have had (more through serious illness than in marriage) of utter dependence, bewildering new landscapes, and starting over. So, no, I’m not that Bride, but I’m IN that bride. No, the poems aren’t the historical truth, but they are a truth of my life. The same is true for others of my poems — I’m not the speaker exactly, but the speaker’s truth gets to a truth of my life, or to something I feel needs examining from my life.My comment: Again, this is how I related to Barbara, the woman in The Devil’s Child, who had horrible experiences I could never expect to enter into or to see firsthand. But I know something of fear, of terror, of feeling abused, of sexual threat, etc. I knew her from the inside, only thank God, less so. Again, this is a self-conscious narrative frame we’ve established, not a lyrical “I.”Sydney Lea writes:  Point 6 is the one that is absolutely on the money for me. Of course all experience, even “true” experience, is edited by the experiencer. Facts are not. Play fast and loose with the facts as a means to personal aggrandizement and you insult all those who have lived the awful factuality of something like a family death. If “I was the man, I suffered, I was there,” then by God I had BETTER have been there!My comment: This is what I mean. If the lyrical “I” is experiencing something, that “I” had by God better have been there. And by removing the narrative frame around the “I,” the poem purports to deliver me into a situation unmediated by anything but the sometimes faulty mind of the writer/speaker. I am that I unless I give plenty of clues that I’m not. That’s just me, now, saying this. Understand that this is what I, Fleda Brown, FEEL about this issue. This is how I react, without a lot of thinking about it. Which is fine with me.Ann Hursey writes: Let’s just say I agree with the responsibility of how writers navigate their words on the page: is it fiction or non-fiction?. . .how deceiving the reader violates “the basic human contract.” And as for “this particular political season. . .”My comment: I am interested in the word “responsibility.” I have a hunch I have some responsibility as I write, to the whole human endeavor. I am not sure what it is, what that would look like, exactly. I certainly don’t want to start making “rules.” All I know to do is to rely on the rudder of my deepest human compassion. I don’t know what that means, either, but I seem to know how it feels when I'm doing it. 

Writing Horrible Things, Part I

Carnegie Mellon University Press has just informed me that they’re shifting their distribution from Cornell University Press to The University Press of New England, and that their authors can either buy their stored books or the books will be destroyed. I have just bought what’s left of The Devil’s Child and The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives.The Devil’s ChildCarnegie-Mellon University Press 1998“This dark, ambitious narrative full of voices, echoes and whispers of anguish is deftly plotted and carefully crafted. Here is a challenging poetry of action and remembrance and the sheer, downright, daily human grotesque. But it is also a poetic sequence that does something altogether more difficult: it holds our interest and its own lyric balance at one and the same time. It compels the sort of music from pain which is hard to forget.”      —Eavan Bolan. . . . . . .Remaindered books are always sad for the writer. The love, the time, the struggle in the making, and then the book turns up in some used bookstore for fifty cents. Or the entire unsold lot is shredded. We are frail and fleeting on the earth, after all.I want to remember The Devil’s Child, and I want you to buy it, if you can stand to read it. You can order it through Brilliant Books http://www.brilliant-books.net/ or through Horizon Books www.horizonbooks.com/ . This book represents my hardest and possibly best work ever, my dredging up the raw material of my own soul to make Barbara’s story. It is her story, but it is also the story of what we all don’t want to look at. It is a true story. The book got one very favorable review in Poetry Magazine but didn’t get caught up in whatever publicity wheel that carries books into the big world. It got a lot of interest wherever I read from it. But as I said, it is not a book for the fainthearted. I will introduce you to it here, and I will continue this essay in another blog post: 

The Devil of a Subject

In Iraq, amid the daily horrors, a hostage was beheaded. Then another. The videos were on the Internet. I didn’t see them, but supposedly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally beheaded one of them. In another, black-hooded insurgents stand over a kneeling, weeping blindfolded man, the sabre descending, finally sawing through bone, the head pulled off and lifted to the light. A short while before, there were the pictures of naked prisoners being abused by American soldiers. I kept repeating to myself lines from my third book of poems. They come from Barbara, a woman raised in a Satanic cult, who describes in ghastly detail the sexual, psychological, and physical abuses of her life, which split her into multiple personalities:Sometimes it makes me madthat you don’t know—underneath, any of usmight do anything....there’s an ecstasy like sexin the most horrible thing that can happen. It has been a long time, thirteen years, since I published The Devil’s Child, and probably sixteen years since I started those poems, but they still pound at me like a headache.  Terror all around. The issue is what to do with it—pretend to ignore it, look at it askance while I go about my life, or focus on it and go crazy with anger and despair? Are there other ways? An old misery comes up in me: I’m a child caught in an out-of-control household. It’s that feeling I try not to sink into, that I tried not to sink into as I was writing the book.How does one approach the unspeakably awful? And how does one make it “true” on paper? The Devil’s Child came out in the wake of many revelations of cult sexual abuse, many accusations that the “recovered memories” were false. I believed that my main character, Barbara—a real person whose life I painstakingly documented—was telling the truth, and I still do. I see what’s around me. But a poem offers a difficult route to truth, and sometimes to a different truth altogether.One time when I was feeling stuck with the book, I asked for help from a well-known poet who had written wonderful long narrative poems. “What do you want to write this kind of stuff for?” he wrote back. “The world is sad and hard enough. We need light, joy, instead of this.” “Well,” I thought but didn’t say, since he was an old man, “I’m going to tell what I believe is the truth.” As did Michael Moore, when he produced Fahrenheit 9/11, as did the soldier who photographed the hundreds of coffins coming in at Dover Air Base from the Iraq war. It’s not particularly a poetic response, but a natural one for me, who grew up in an insular family, with two parents who were pretty much children themselves, ranting and crying with little concern for the effect on us children, and a severely retarded brother who had grand mal seizures. I felt I was living in a private bubble of my own misery, all of it invisible to the outside world. I knew a little about how the real Barbara felt, wanting the validation of print for her story, wanting people to know that the worst can happen, does happen. And that if a person splits away from the misery, shuts it away, the misery is heartened, heightened, free to go where it will.I met Barbara years ago in a therapy group I joined for a short time after my divorce.  When I first came to the group, she was describing some incident in her past, hesitating as if she weren't sure that what she had to say belonged to the same world the rest of us lived in.  I assumed she was telling a dream, but I was new, so I kept my mouth shut.  By the second session, I was pretty sure I was wrong.  I asked her if I could use her story in poems.At first I was fascinated by what she had to tell me—it was sensational, violent, and psychologically complex.  But that was my crafty, analytic mind.  My other mind was feeling her terror coming up against my own old terrors—minor, compared to hers, but there, nonetheless.  Before I finished her voice in the poems, the Barbara I wrote about was a wild exaggeration of myself. Her story seemed to me all about images, not thoughts—the way images ravish us, positively and negatively, in the subconscious, particularly when they're frozen into icons, including religious icons.. . . . . . more to come