A
few weeks ago there was a panel debate at the Troubadour about the “I” in
poems, with Fiona Sampson, Ron Villanueva, Tim Liardet and me. We
discussed, of course, everything from self-exposure to self-invention to
self-indulgence. Beforehand I collected
some quotes that helped me think about the subject – they don’t all address it
directly. It seems a shame to waste them,
so here they are. I think I actually
read the first one out during the discussion; the rest stayed in my head.
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to
speak. It began in the moment when we
accumulated silent things within us.
Gaston Bachelard, quoted in a lecture by Seamus Heaney.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel
with ourselves, poetry.
W B Yeats, Essays
Facts are very unimportant things, there to make you believe in the
emotional content in a poem.
Anne Sexton (in a radio interview)
I must begin with first the illusion of an intention. The poem begins to form from the first
intention. But the intention is already
breaking into another. The first
intention begins me but of course continually shatters itself and is replaced
by the child of the new collision… The
poem is more than the poet's intention. The poet does not write what he knows
but what he does not know.
W S Graham, Notes on a Poetry of Release
To write a poem is to work with change, to deal with a shape-shifter.
Kathleen Jamie, from Strong Words (Bloodaxe)
The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake;
It is myself that I remake.
W B Yeats
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality.
TS Eliot, from The Sacred Wood (essays)
For the [American] Gurlesque poet, the use of the lyric “I” does
not confess a self, but rather a raucously messy nest of conflicting desires
and proclivities that can be costumed this way or that. Disjunctions in
identity are not to be worked through or resolved but savored and tapped for
their cultural power.
Lara Glenum in Jacket
Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass
Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my
grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty
of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the
unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as
artificial, as a glass eye.
Elizabeth Bishop (in an unpublished talk. Thanks to Jacqui
Saphra for unearthing this quote.)
A short poem in which the poet, the poet’s persona, or another
speaker expresses personal feelings.
Poetry Foundation definition of lyric poetry
A highly concentrated and passionate form of communication
between strangers.
Edward Hirsch on lyric poetry, Poetry Foundation website
The speaker is a device for making the invisible visible.
Princeton Encyclopaedia gloss on a definition of deconstruction
*** *** ***
To
end, here’s a favourite haiku that seems relevant in 2016 when some blossom is past
its best by the end of February. Issa
was talking about old-Japanese new year, of course, in early spring, and meant something
completely different... I think this translation
should be read (or heard in the head) in an ironically grumpy elderly American
male voice, to get the absolute most out of it.
New Year’s Day –
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Issa (1763-1828), translated by Robert Hass
