jeff newerry

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Poetry, Life, and Necessary Fictions

5/1/2012

5 Comments

 
It was a common scene in any given undergraduate workshop in which I was enrolled:  the group would discuss a poem, and afterward, the poet, connecting her life with her art would say something like, “But that’s how it happened.”

The professor would then swiftly remind the young poet that life is life and art is art. Just because something happened in life doesn’t mean that a reader has to accept it in writing. The class moved on to the next poem or short story, and the lesson stuck in my head. Over the years, I have struggled with this tension between life and art.

Last night, I was lying awake, thinking about a possible poem:  my mother used to clean houses to help make ends meet. She worked a split shift at the local telephone company, and in the four hour break between shifts, she picked up my brother and I from school, got us home, cleaned a house, came back home, made supper, and headed back to work. Thinking about that routine, I became fascinated by the duality of it all:  two jobs, two sons, two homes, two worlds, two lives, and so on. I imagined the structure would be in couplets to emphasize the two-ness of the poem.

Then, as I tried to work out the opening lines in my head, I began to think about how much of my writing emerges this way:  from life experience. It’s not such a strange thing, really. I think that many writers turn to the page to make sense of the world. But in the workshops I took, I was taught that on the page itself, I learned that my life didn’t matter all that much. Only the writing mattered.

I don’t want to give the impression that my professors were terrible people. I had wonderful teachers, all caring mentors who helped me as I struggled to learn how to write. Particularly Ed Pavlic at the University of Georgia pushed and prodded me, helping me to find my poetic voice. Without his advice, I’m certain that I would still be struggling to rewrite John Donne and Mark Jarman. Without Ed’s influence, I’d be the same poet I was ten years ago and not constantly evolving and restlessly experimenting.

My teachers, however, knew my writing, not my life. The lines I spun were more important in the classroom that the experience that inspired those lines. My teachers understood that editors and potential publishers knew only the words on the page, not the awkward balding big man with glasses who wrote poetry to try to make sense of his place in the world.

Yet, I can’t ignore my life. I can’t pretend that I don’t write from experience. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many brilliant writers in my life, poets and fiction writers and essayists motivated by theory and poetics. Their work is widely praised and rightly so. But my writing is less theoretical, less motivated by a poetics and more experiential. In many circles, that fact makes me a second-tier poet. In writing about my life, I risk sentimentality. But I think that every piece of art should run that risk.

Of course, I realize that my life experience is a kind of fiction. What I remember about my childhood is very much a narrative I’ve built over the years. But that narrative emerges from actual fact—things that I remember happening. And when I write about those things, I realize that the artifact that emerges (the poem itself) is not the actual experience but a kind of re-writing of that experience. I guess that in writing about my life, I am trying to re-write my past. For each poem, then, I have two memories:  the experience that inspired the poem and the poem itself. And at various times, one is the shadow and one is the fire. One is the tenor and one is the vehicle.

For me, the necessary fiction of poetry makes the experience bearable. The poem distances the reality, and the reality focuses the poem.

This is starting to get tangled, and I don’t want to suggest that every poem I write works this way. For me, writing a poem happens mainly in revision, when I am fine-tuning lines, reading the work aloud, and trying to find the poem’s shape. In that process, the experience fades into the background, little more than white noise at the edge of my consciousness.

But in the end, when the poem is abandoned (says Valery), I am left with a thing (artifact? by-product?) of both artifice and experience. It’s trite to say yin and yang, so I won’t. I will say that in the end, my life and my writing have become so entangled that when I read my work, I often can’t remember the actual events any more. I remember only what the poem allows me to remember. And I think that’s enough.

5 Comments
patricia florio link
5/1/2012 02:37:57 am

I found your comments very interest. I too struggle with separating life and art. After being a court reporter in the federal court system for 17 years, I quit my job to return to higher education. I loved everything about going back to school. I would be a perpetual student if I had the funds. Getting back to your poetry. I've been trying to write a chapbook based on The Court Reporter Inside. I find that I am a copious note taker because the court reporter still remains alive, and I write in my head or on a piece of paper what people are saying. I did have a memoir published and now I'm trying to work on poetry. Any suggestions how to drag it out of me?

Reply
Jeff Newberry link
5/1/2012 10:07:00 am

Hi Patricia,

I see a strong connection between poetry and lyrical prose. I'm not sure what kind of a memoir you've written, but you might be surprised at how close a lot of narrative nonfiction is to lyric poetry.

I love your idea. I think the trick might be to focus on the form. I don't know what kind of things a court reporter writes--if the reports are in a certain form or follow a kind of shorthand--but I would write poems based on that. This way, you an free yourself up and not worry so much about subject matter. I'd love to take a look at your poems sometime. You can contact me at jeff.newberry@gmail.com

Thanks for reading my blog, and thank you for you thoughtful comment.

Reply
Surazeus Simon Seamount link
5/1/2012 02:56:35 am

All the most ancient poems, and all the current most widely read works of literature, are always stories about people. Who they were, what their strengths and weaknesses, people they encountered, thoughts and feelings they expressed or repressed, actions they performed, how they reacted to situations and consequences.

Explore those memories and tell the story of your life in poems. I created my own form of poetry I call Cinemism, which is really just a revival of narrative story-telling in verse.

Your own life, the lives of all those people who went through the court system, lives of people whose stories appear in the news, those are the substance of poetry.

All religions are really dramatized book clubs about the story of the "founder" and his success in presenting a more complex way of thinking and acting in the world.

Sure the poem is the craft of arranging words like pieces of a puzzle to tell the story, but there is no one right way to tell the story. There are many ways people in the past have told stories, and all those tools and methods are ours to use.

Reply
Jeff Newberry link
5/1/2012 10:11:50 am

Hi Surazeus,

I appreciate your taking time to comment on my blog. While I may disagree with you about religion, I think I understand your point. There is no right way to tell a story or write a poem; a good piece of art will find its own organic form, but only if the writer is mature enough to listen to what the writing wants.

I'm interested in your nonce form, the Cinemism. The word suggests "cinema" and I assume that you're playing with the language and/or techniques of film in your form.

There's been plenty of narrative poetry over the years. It has a very strong place in contemporary letters. Do you know the Storyline anthology, *Story Hour: Contemporary American Narrative Poems* (http://www.amazon.com/Story-Hour-Contemporary-American-Narrative/dp/1586540351). It's definitely worth a read.

Thanks again for your comment, and thanks again for reading.

Reply
West Virginia Women link
7/9/2012 03:32:41 am

Found this blog from Weebly's index, nice!

Reply



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    O for a muse of fire,
    that would ascend
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    of invention . . .
    --Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue


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  • Home
  • Biography
  • Writing
    • Cross Country
    • A Stairway to the Sea
    • The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast
    • Brackish
    • A Visible Sign
  • Teaching
    • Curriculum Vita
    • Teaching Philosophy
  • Contact