My major area has to do with the myth of the self and identity creation in 20th century American poetry, a question that seems to very much take its most visible root in mid-century confessional poetry. C. mentioned the other day that a friend asked if I, being a poet, liked Sylvia Plath, and he told me that he laughed and said “that’s a complicated question.” Because, of course, the question was phrased in the way that most think of Plath: not just what you think of her work, but what do you think of her, the myth of her.
Should biography be important?
Most mainstream readers of poetry aren’t really interested in the death of the author. This isn’t an issue with readers of contemporary fiction, though I do always laugh when I see the placard ‘Based on a True Story’ in a movie trailer or in the first pages of a ‘fictionalized account’. I quite like this quote from Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift on the subject of the myth of the poet, particularly the dead poet:
The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here.
I find, in my own work, that I write in third person to escape a lot of these associations. That, by casting myself as ‘she’ or ‘her’, I create enough distance to tell my own version of autobiography. (I talked about this briefly for Blackbird.) It’s an escape hatch that I’m attempting to stop using, because I worry that it’s like writing a poem about a dream: difficult to get your audience invested. Instead, I’ve been writing first-person poems that include deliberate lies: my speaker has been married for three years, my speaker is uncomfortable in the trappings of contemporary life (which, in its own way, feeds into Bellow’s discussion of created mythology), my speaker is mourning a child. My speaker is not me, not me, not me. Don’t look at the girl behind the curtain; the girl isn’t the issue. How she’s hiding and how she’s revealing herself — that’s what is.
