Honesty, Batman and “I”, and Moving Forward
After reading Tony Brown’s latest Zero Point Zero column, “Kicking an Addiction“, a couple of things jumped out at me about my own writing that I’ve always known but kept buried in one of the more remote closets in my brain.
Much like the speaker in Buddy Wakefield’s poem “Convenience Stores,” I’m addicted to novelty. If I can’t be unique, can’t take a unique tack on a subject, I don’t see it as worth tackling.
For me, that idea of “novelty” always manifested itself in my tendency to write from my own perspective, distilling my own experiences into literal narratives or thinly veiled allegories. In the old “fiction in the first person” debate, I used to come down on the side of “absolute truth” — if you say “I” then it should be true — as opposed to “relative truth”, despite the fact that some of my own poetry arguably falls somewhere in between.
One of the main reasons I’ve never been interested in pursuing journalism full-time is that the idea of writing about things I have no personal interest in bores me to tears. The couple of handfuls of articles I’ve written for publication, paid or not, were either about poetry slam or comics.
Sometime in late 2000, I think, my writing started to become increasingly sporadic, partly because I was more and more focused on running a little bit louder, but partly because I was running out of things I wanted to say. Or, more honestly, things I was willing to say publicly. The problem with the “absolute truth” approach is that it requires complete honesty and that means potentially hurting people’s feelings and/or exposing ugly truths or, the option I often chose, simply not writing about certain things.
I’ve always admired those whom I’ve perceived as being completely honest in their poetry, willing to expose raw emotion and unveil unflattering truths about themselves, like Bassey, Rachel, Peter of the Earth and Jason Carney. As my own poetry steadily moved towards a more personal narrative style, the deeper I dug into my own memories and experiences, the more I tapped into my feelings about different things, the more I started to avoid writing certain poems because I realized I wasn’t interested in being that honest.
The day Batman went from being a metaphor to the subject of a straightforward poem about why he fights crime I realized I had backed myself into a corner from which there were only two escape routes. I chose the “easier” one, and simply stopped writing poetry, convincing myself that I’d said all that I wanted to say in the form and was ready to move on — ironically, I ended up writing about comics for a couple of years to keep the creative juices flowing.
“Honesty is the best policy” may be cliché, but it’s absolutely true when referring to one’s self.
Tony’s column triggered something in my brain, opening another of the many doors that I’ve been unlocking over the past couple of months, and as I commented over there, my recently renewed focus on poetry includes casting my net wider and writing about other people’s experiences. “I” am still going to be in many of the poems I write, but it’s becoming more of a fictional relative “I”, freed from the constraints of literal “absolute truth” and indulging in the wide open spaces of metaphorical “relative truths”.
Seeing as old habits die hard, and I’ve found myself wandering into bars to do some free writing whenever I get a chance, instead of keeping my head down and in my notebook, I’m now actively taking in my surroundings and turning them into character sketches, or short scenes, or even entire poems, as I did last week with Old New York Love Story, practically a “found poem” as the meat of it was written in the very moment it was happening, me writing as fast as I could to transcribe it as closely as possible. (Mariah @ the Dive Bar was written in and inspired by that same bar, so it’s probably time to find a new one.)
On a semi-related note, in my quest to find an open mic where I could read without the “safety net” of familiarity 13 offers, I checked out Rev. Jen’s Anti-Slam on Wednesday night and realized why I started a little bit louder in the first place. The less said about that night, the better — though the venue, Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction serves an amazing Cuban Reuben that I will definitely return for and highly recommend! — but it was a nice reminder about the importance of making a space as comfortable and welcoming as possible, while serving as an object lesson that you simply can’t be all things to all people, and you shouldn’t try to be. Kudos to Jen for her 11 year run, and wow, can you believe a little bit louder/louderARTS will celebrate its 10th anniversary next Spring?!?
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