Banango Lit

I read some comments on a review of Spencer Madsen’s book ‘a million bears’ and it led me to think about the connection between the ‘truth’ and the actual words on the page of a poem.

Here is the comment I felt strongly negatively about:

I went to highschool with this idiot, and I remember he had about only one girlfriend. Now it’s a bit hard for me to believe that in the span of 2 years Spencer Madsen has become a alcoholic bruiting poet who mirrors the image of a 28 year old brooklynite poet; who has terrible luck with women. There is a reason he’s compilation of poetry is called “a million bears” it resembles a book called “a million little pieces”

Here is the comment I left on the review, that I will expand upon here:

how does questioning his ‘persona’ (which i am not questioning because i believe it closely reflects spencer’) a reason to ‘dis’ a book of poetry?

in other words, why must poetry be held to different standards than fiction in terms of the connection between the writer and the voice in the poems? like, if i publish a book of poems written in the voice of a geriatric woman, will people not like it because it is in a voice that is ‘beyond my years’ and somehow not ‘genuine’ because of that?

idk, poetry is literature and literature doesn’t really hold an obligation to the truth, if you think something is interesting then personal opinions of the author should not change the way you think about it

Here is the problem: the ‘poet’ is considered essential to the understanding of the poem, whereas the ‘short story writer’ is not considered essential to the understanding of the short story. Poetry is expected to be more ‘true’ than prose.

When someone reads, say, “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, it is nearly impossible for the reader to discern the difference between the voice of the poet and the voice of the speaker of the poem, and this isn’t really okay. Because, what if Plath had actually been a middle aged woman with a happy life in the suburbs of Miami. Would her poems be devalued because of this? Probably, at least in the minds of many readers.

Meanwhile, the short story exists in a different space. Does the reader ‘believe’ that Junot Diaz and George Saunders live the lives they write about in the fiction? Of course not. The reader understands that they are reading something fictional. But, by adding line breaks, the reader instinctively feels like there is some sort of connection made between the writing and the ‘truth’ of the writer’s actual life.

I feel like this is a very bad thing for poetry.

It seems to be very rampant in the online literary community, writers creating semi-autobiographical poems. I have no problem with this. I like this. I like that writers can create interesting things from their life.

But if we find out that one of these writers is writing things that seem semi-autobiographical that are, in actuality, completely figmented, then the piece is viewed as less ‘true’, less ‘vital’, less ‘meaningful’.

This isn’t really true in prose though. If something is explicitly published as a memoir, like James Frey, then yeah, the reader feels betrayed when it turns out to not be true. So, poetry is treated like memoir even though there is nothing saying a poem must be true. But for pieces that live in the fuzzy area between memoir and fiction, or live completely in the fiction area, the way ‘truth’ is treated is very different.

Some examples of this, these weirdly auto-biographical pieces that are accepted either as fiction or tagged as fiction, include writers like Tao Lin and Marie Calloway. It’s fairly accepted that Richard Yates is a semi-autobiographical novel. Likewise, the ‘Adrien Brody’ story by Marie Calloway is, I think, mostly based on real life things. Both writers (as well as many others) write semi-autobiographical things that generate buzz (negative a lot of the time, it sees). The Calloway piece is being criticized (see comments here) for the way it affects the life of the ‘Brody’ character and his real life girlfriend. When prose isn’t explicitly called memoir, it seems like readers and critics feel betrayed when it is ‘too true’. So, to keep score: poetry needs to be true or readers won’t believe it, but a prose piece that is called ‘fiction’ better not be true or people will get mad and start large shit storms about it. Why?

The answer, I think, lies with the confessional and romantic movements in poetry. Keats was dying and his poetry reflected that. Plath was slightly deranged and we get that out of her poems. O’Hara wrote poems about living in New York that were very close to his personal experiences of New York. Poetry existed very close to the ‘real’ life of the poets. But going farther back, the epic poems of Homer were not autobiographical. The work of many 17th century British poets was not autobiographical. The romantic movement brought a change to the ideas of poetry, but the change didn’t really change fiction any.

So, we have a world now where poetry is expected to be partly-autobiographical in order to be accepted by a large audience. Sure, the ‘literary’ community loves surreal work. We like Dean Young, whose poems are autobiographical in emotion but not really in content. We like Mathias Svalina, whose work seems to exist in a world that is very un-real. But to the larger world, the bestselling poets, I think, are Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. School children love Robert Frost. These poets’ work, even if not entirely autobiographical, at least feels like it is.

I’m not sure what the point of this is. We should judge poetry by the merit of the work and not the social life of the writer. If you don’t think Spencer Madsen is sad, then cool, but don’t let that view change your view on the stuff he writes. Or something, I don’t know.