"Poetry has nothing to do with the truth."?! Chris, I take the bait. Can a
projection be a lie?

"Lies". This word is goading me, so there is probably some truth to it. I
would like to think that the odd local truth will bubble up, if one works
with sufficient care.

Hi Anne, here's some thoughts on the matter. Truth is inadvertent, but I'm
thinking through this below:

I wouldn't want to press the point that poets are intentional liars, though
I am, and where the poems are concerned that's largely irrelevant anyway; we
only have the text to go on. We did once debate the issues surrounding
whether the poet should ever be taken into question; to recap, in an extreme
example, what would we do if we discovered Wordsworth was an infanticide?
The poems remain the same, but should we take this in to account. Pound was
an anti-semite, how does this affect our judgement of the poems? This is
really about accommodation. We may revere Christian art, but untold millions
have been butchered and mutilated in its name. Does this inform our
perception? It's in this domain of intention and response that lies are
great fun.

In a less extreme context, anyone pretending their poetry is representative
of either their own or of a collective experience cannot be proven as
demonstrably true. An easy example might be the use of the personal pronoun.
Some may argue this is passe as it fails to represent other modes of being
and an openness towards other experience. But the practise of such a stance
is palpably false; that an individual can, by avoiding self reference, be
held to accurately represent otherness? It is a (persona) construct, and one
emerging from the self, in this sense it is more disingenuous to avoid the
pronoun when considering experience than to use it (even though one
immediately fictionalises oneself when one does). Similarly, anyone
attempting to use the personal pronoun to "confess", which may be considered
outdated, could be constructing an entirely fictitious individual "I" and
use the personal pronoun with abandon to explore otherness in exactly the
same way as avoiding it. Playing with such approaches, whilst characterising
post-modernism, does not in anyway make poems true. I believe Trollope wrote
succesfully under a female pseudonym to test his skills at the height of his
powers.

What I am pressing for here is an understanding that poetry is a medium with
no fixed outcome, given this I've always felt that it would be absurd to
leave things too open ended, as this is already guaranteed. I think that the
boundaries of the medium often make it difficult to determine what piece of
text actaully constitutes a poem, nevermind the truth. And as we have seen
historically in Dadaism the practice of naming something is highly
questionable. In this context the poem can have no special bearing on the
truth either, no more so than a bus ticket or the rules and regulations of
WAGN railway. In fact more so, as the "poem" provides no demonstrable
repeatable evidence that something is true, unlike our trains and buses
(joke).

Many of us confuse truth with recognition and empathy, and if we share an
experience like, say, "yeah my father died like that, that's so true", we
are being invited (perhaps even coerced) by the textual references to make
broadly focussed emotional responses. The fact that the poet's father did
not die in such and such a way but that the poem just seemed to lead that
way would make the poem a lie. That betrayal is a key factor in the frisson
that a poem can generate. We want to betray the reader in order to effect.
The motives for effect can be infinitely various, to discourage usury, to
send us to war, to mock power, to preserve power. Sometimes we read
something with "suspended disbelief" to gain pleasure from the way in which
it is being said. Kind of like crying at a weepy scene in a reconciliation
movie, where we know we're being had, but the procedure is allowing us to
vent our emotions and thereby to feel momentarily liberated or even perhaps
coalescent with humanity in a vaguely sensuous way.

Or it's like someone saying, "Jesus loves us", when for an atheist this is
patently absurd, and indeed offensive. But for those people who have been
led to believe this, it may be their raison d'etre. I find lying in poems
actually quite liberating and very few if any poems are reflections of me in
the sense that I would want to own. It is partly to do with the sayable and
the conflicts of the said. The more honest the poet feels in their
intentions the less accurate they are in their effects. It is the
Wittgensteinian "whereof one cannot speak . . . " Except the poet keeps
writing and leaves us more incredulous.

So there are three things in here. Firstly, that the aleatory processes
often involved in making the poem are not processes designed to establish
the truth but more often to establish precision of effect, chance is not
truth. Secondly, that the originator of the poem may or may not be retelling
her experience honestly. Thirdly, that even if she were being honest, the
recipient may establish that the verbal construct was in fact a lie (i.e the
completion of the argument "a poem is true" is dependent on all readers at
all times demonstrating this, which I purport is impossible). This isn't to
say that the individual reader cannot find the poem to be "true", i.e.
congruent (resonant even) with her world view, but we must be careful not to
cite this as a larger argument that therefore poetry is truth. What we have
in such as case is an audience of like-minded people. Similarly we cannot
argue for "integrity", "honesty" or "moral worth".

I have said elsewhere that poets are fabulists. It's often the case that the
pursuit of the poem's destiny, or let's say more simply the following of
impulses in constructing verbal patterns, sound patterns and patterns of
meaning, leads one away from the known and the biographically assimilated
nuances of being, into a kind of waywardness and distancing from the self.
It is, as it were, unavoidable. It makes no difference to the poem what the
intentions of the poet were, as the only empirical test is reading. I would
argue that it is not an acceptable litmus test either, that a poem that is
true is "good" or less controversially, "effective", as this would be
obviously reductive and absurd. To suggest such would be to suggest that all
fiction (i.e. lies) are of no value. The value is entertainment, that most
pernicious of words. In fact no matter what our intentions are, that is all
the poem is, entertainment. The rest is window dressing.

Lastly, it would bring about a real paucity of means if we wanted poems to
be true, as their truth has nothing to do with their value.

All of which may be a lie.

Best

Chris


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