Belay that! Do somethin' else! Really.

[sheenaghpugh]

Posting because I just visited Gillian Clarke's web site. Gillian is even more GCSE'd than I am, and hence has a very full section designed to help out students. On her poem "Last Rites", a student asks "Is the story true?" Her reply is "Yes. If a poem uses the poet’s own voice, and tells a story from his or her own viewpoint, it is true. The point of view, the personal voice, the place names, the reference to an inquest, the precise description, all tell you it is fact. Sometimes a poet takes the viewpoint of a character, not his or her self. Then the poet uses imagination."

Those who know my obsession on this point will not be surprised to hear that this assertion horrifies me. Dear prospective studentses who may be preparing to land up in the country's Eng Lit departments, please be aware that this is a personal view, and one which I suspect many poets do not share. In the first place, what exactly is "the poet's own voice"? If she means the "I" voice, I can assure you that I write many downright lies in just that voice. Even if I did by chance use some experience of my own, I would certainly change and embroider it; I do not become less of an inventor in the "I" voice, nor save my "imagination" for when I am pretending to be someone else. As for place names and precise description, those are what we all use to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, and again they do not necessarily indicate that It All Happened - they indicate that the poet is a good liar, as he or she should be; it belongs to our trade. I know I've said this a tedious number of times, but if even poets are putting out advice like this, it clearly needs saying again: THE NARRATOR IS NOT THE AUTHOR.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Also... I had this conversation a couple of weeks ago.

X: Y says that you did Z.
Me: But I didn't do Z.
X: Perhaps not, but Y feels as if you did. Therefore it's Y's emotional truth. Therefore it's true.
Me: And your name's Humpty Dumpty.

I do wish people wouldn't treat facts like so much Play-Do.

[sheenaghpugh]

Ah. That would be a sort of personal factoid, as opposed to the historical sort....

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Oh, agreed 100%. When I was about 15 I was awarded either third place or highly commended in a competition for poetry organised by the local music festival. The poem was in the "I" voice and it was a musing by a witness in a criminal on what the oath to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" actually meant.

Then and ever since I've never been closer to a criminal trial than either Crown Court on TV or (twice) the public galleries as a spectator.

There is absolutely no way without an author's note anyone could tell if the poem that I entered in that competition (which the judges must have liked and found resonated in some way) was autobiographical or not, and it's nuts to think that anyone can (or should).

To say nothing (as I should have said upfront) of missing the whole point about what the poem was about, namely the subjectivity of truth anyway.

[justwolf.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a really unhelpful thing to say to students. Perhaps that statement is true for Clarke, but for the vast majority of poems it's not the case, as you say. I kind of want to start hanging out in poetry sections of bookshops wearing a t-shirt that says, "The Narrator is Not the Author".

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

I sympathise to the max, though oddly enough I'm having the opposite experience. I'm finding my awful antagonist IS, in a certain twisted and one-dimensional way, the author and it's rather an eye-opener ;-)

From the Almanach de Gotha

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Countesses and above: DO NOT ACCEPT INVITATIONS FROM THE BROWNINGS.

[julesjones]

[bangs head against keyboard]

Were I a graphic artist there would be a "The narrator is not the author" teeshirt on CafePress this afternoon.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

The student asked one poet if the events in one poem actually took place.

The poet said yes, which was all well and good, and then proceeded to say that her personal rules for poetry applied to all poets.

I think I see a logical fallacy here.

[sheenaghpugh]

Indeed, if she'd stopped at "yes", it would have been better... though better yet if she'd said "yes, within the limitations of my memory".

Authorial Voice

[ext-1931131.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I would be absolutely horrified if people thought the 'I' in my poetry related directly to necessarily personal experience. We all use bits of our own experience in our writing. But to me, the 'I' in the poem, the assumed 'author', is a fictional character. There are several 'authors' involved in a piece: the 'I' first person character in the poem, the *actual* author who is writing it, and also the authorial voice, that 'other' author who stands between the actual author and the 'I' and who takes a subjective view of the piece as it is being worked on. Or am I just schizophrenic.....!
Kathy Miles