Biography and Lying in Poetry

Where is the dividing line between “cultivated narratives,” and those which simply grow up wild and organic from the lives of their creators?

There is still another kind of linking narrative which we haven’t discussed yet.  It is the inadvertent one, the one which corresponds most closely to prose biography. I know, I know, this sounds like I’m talking about confessional poetry again, and perhaps I have come full circle from my original argument. 

Enter David Weigl, who in book after book returns to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

A bouncing betty comes up waist high –
cuts you in half.
One man’s legs were laid
alongside him in the Dustoff:
he asked for a chairback, morphine.
He screamed he wanted to give
his eyes away, his kidneys,
his heart.... (1)

Weigl does not abandon his readers in Vietnam, though. His many books have given him time (his first was published in 1976) and pages enough to explore different chapters of life – marriage, parenting, spirituality, and recovery. 

Note how the voice in this piece based on childhood, 

Mr. Brown

            was my teacher

of the sums in the sixth grade

and he saw the beautiful

figures in everything.  (2)

differs from this, in which a man looks back on the years since childhood:

All morning long in the rain,

            I drove through the street of my boyhood

past the falling-down houses,

with my friend from my boyhood

            who is a man now, like me. (3)

The nature of how poets write when they’re writing their own lives -- and poets are always writing their own lives, even when they costume it in fiction -- leads poets to create unintentional narratives.

In Bruce Weigl’s thirteen books he has returned again and again to American soldiers in Vietnam, but also spends lots of time with the Vietnamese people themselves, as well as with American veterans at home. The whole of his work taken together weaves a life story, just as volumes of a private journal or a stack of personal letters would. Weigl has said in interviews that not everything in his poems happened exactly the way it was written, that imagination has altered the way he has written events.(4) Even so, if it were prose we would call it biography.

So, where is the dividing line between intentional linking narratives – “cultivated narratives,” -- and those which simply grow up wild and organic from the lives of their creators? 

1. Weigl, Bruce. Executioner. (Small Press Distribution: Berkeley. 1976.)

2. Weigl, Bruce. The Unraveling Strangeness. (Grove Press: New York, 2002) 28.

3. Weigl, Bruce. The Unraveling Strangeness. (Grove Press: New York, 2002) 37.
4. Dameshek, Brandon, "An Interviews with Bruce Weigl," Memorious: A Forum for New Verse and Poetics, Issue No. 2, July 2004, 3 May 2006. http://memorious.org/?id=58.

Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red

Q: In her novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red, why has Anne Carson harnessed creatures from Ancient Greece to tell a story of adolescent love in modern Canada?

 

A careful reader may have noticed that none of the books we’re using in this series is set in the present moment.  Even Ultima Thule in which Davis McCombs introduces a second, contemporary speaker late in the book, he still uses a speaker from the mid-nineteenth century for the main narrative. 

By contrast, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red uses Geryon and Herakles as a romantic pair of teenagers in contemporary Canada.  Here is a bit of the backstory: Young Geryon discovers his older brother masturbating in the bunk below:

Why do you pull on your stick?

Geryon asked. None of your business let’s see yours, said his brother.

No.

Bet you don’t have one. Geryon checked. Yes I do.

You’re so ugly I bet it fell off.

Geryon remained silent.  He knew the difference between facts and brother hatred.(1)

Several questions come to mind.

• Why has Anne Carson taken on creatures with such gravitas, and then let their story unfold through the most mundane events? 
• Has Carson wasted the archetypal potential of these Greek mythological characters?
• Using the guise of a red chthonic creature with wings, is Carson writing about her own life?

Perhaps the last question should be, “how does using the guise of a winged red creature help Carson write about the life she knows?” We will discuss a poet’s way of knowing in a subsequent article, but for now let’s focus on how Carson’s story is shaded by the use of Geryon. Many have argued that this technique only appropriates gravitas otherwise unearned by actors who, in this case, spend a good deal of time squabbling and necking in cafés.

Another interpretation, however, is that Carson is making creative use of a template. By employing characters we already know, she is free to tell her story without the clutter of lengthy dissertations on Eros and Thanatos and the seductiveness of beautiful destroyers. Upon this prepared emotional field, Carson is free to overlay a nuanced narrative about gay youth, the explorations of love, relationships with eccentric but loving parents, and the symbiotic nature of art in life.

Exercise: Think about your most recent poem.  Consider what historical or mythological figure might represent the speaker and others in the poem. If you make these substitutions, how does your poem feel/mean something different?

1. Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. Vintage Books: New York. 1998.