A random thought just passed by and smacked me: when I read a poem, a picture starts to form in my mind of the poet. I don’t mean a picture of the poet’s physical appearance, although that may happen eventually. I mean an impression of a person, an individual, created by the voice of the poet as expressed in the poem. These days, we’re all sophisticated enough to acknowledge that “voice” is something constructed by a writer out of the raw materials of diction, syntax, subject matter, and rhetorical and metrical habits. But, no matter how knowingly constructed that voice is, it is still representative of a person, and it creates for the reader an image of a person.
Who is it then that I’m reading? Publishers generously place a headshot of the poet somewhere on the back of the book or on an “About the Author” page. While these pictures are not necessarily glamor photos, they help to sell the book. (If they didn’t help, they wouldn’t be there taking up space.) This suggests to me that other people have thought quite a bit about this, and I may be late to the party. The publishers want me, the reader, to imagine an author speaking to me. The author wants it as well. Poets, like all writers, tell us about themselves by what they write about and how they write about it. This is so obvious that it’s embarrassing. Perhaps, that means this has been one of those big subjects of conversation that I’ve simply missed. If so, I apologize for taking up my own readers’ time.
I teach a poetry workshop each semester in a Florida prison, and in the first class, I usually tell my students that writing poetry is like opening a door in the side of your head and letting people come in. I want them to understand that when they write they’re talking with real people, the people who will be their readers. I also want them to understand that there is no way to avoid this relationship. Student poets often go out of their way to avoid talking about what they’re actually talking about. If the subject of the poem is a break-up, they will write about climbing a mountain or traversing an arid desert with sudden sandstorms. The problem here is not restricted to poets: human beings want desperately to be known and are equally terrified to be known. To be loved (or even encountered in a poem), we have to allow ourselves to be known, but we suspect that we’re not really all that loveable.
Over a hundred years ago, Ezra Pound advised poets to use “direct treatment of the thing.” I confess that for most of the last fifty years, I had no idea what he was talking about. Now, I realize that he meant if you’re writing about a break-up, write about the break-up. Again, it seems ridiculously obvious, but it’s one of the toughest hurdles for poets, for all poets, not just students. We come up with a lot of inventive, elegant, and even surreal ways to circumvent what it is we’re actually saying. We want to give the reader the subjective experience of what it feels like to be us, and at the same time… maybe not.
There is not a lot of help for this dilemma. Except, if you write long enough and make the same mistakes over and over, you may end up realizing that whatever you write, you are naked to your reader. The reader sees you. About this time, you will likely ask yourself why you ever thought you should write a poem and why—even worse—you ever considered publishing it.
It is not only the subject matter of our poems that is so revealing; it is how we express ourselves, the words we use. The readers who have read what we have read will see the way those books have become embedded in our brains. We can’t help but echo them when we least expect it, and our readers see that. (Of course, they are most likely to recognize it if those same books are embedded in their own brains.) One of the great goals of writing poetry is to sound like yourself, but poets are aware that this self has been built out of other voices, other selves.
Who knew when we started to write poetry that there would be so much we’d try to avoid revealing? Still, I suspect that very few writers ever stop writing because they’re afraid of these revelations. The desire to be known is just as strong as the fear of being known. We want to become an image in someone else’s mind, a voice that becomes part of someone else’s voice. This is the real tradition. We learn to speak by listening to others speak. We take on the diction and syntax that appeals to our sensibilities and then shapes those sensibilities. In our poems, we can’t help being who we are, but the people who read those poems will meet us there. Even though we will not be wearing our best clothes and may be in need of a trip to the barber or hair stylist, that won’t stop them from listening.