Chris, I think what you say is very interesting, especially when you say
that none of your poems is a reflection of yourself that you'd like to own;
perhaps this is at the heart of what I think is a quite reasonable coyness
on the part of writers who don't want to have the less pleasant parts of
themselves commented on, and would prefer readers to think of these as pure
creations. I'd argue that lies are just as much part of the self as more
recognisable 'truths'; and the truth anyway is something much bigger than
just what we can safely say is factually correct. The way the poet lies and
the kind of lie that is convincing for them to construct comes from some
part of themselves, a part which is honest and true.

And anyway, to get a decent lie, you have to start from the truth.

Selima Hill in 'Violet' has a quote at the front which says something along
the lines of 'To get to the truth you don't have to tell the
what-actually-happened truth'. This is another good point: facts are only a
building block. I'd say they were an important one, but poetry isn't
biography or journalism.

Best
Polly

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Emery [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 19 May 1999 20:26
> To: UK and Irish poets
> Subject: Lies, damned lies and the avant-garde
>
> "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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