Well, the word "exploitation" certainly comes to mind. I think there probably is something very shoddy about adopting the voice of -- say -- a survivor of Hiroshima. It's not so much the milking of a massive tragedy -- the Holocaust would be another example -- for one's own poetic gain, or the presumption of thinking that one can imagine that depth of suffering, as that it's just too easy. Gee, I want to write a poem about suffering -- well, look no further than Hiroshima! Everybody knows about it! All I have to do is invoke it, and everyone knows that this is an Important Poem about Suffering (or injustice, or the evils or war, or whatever).
And other people would disagree, but I can't imagine pretending to have had experiences I haven't actually had, on one level or another. I would never write about my father's death, because he is alive and well -- I suppose I could write a poem about imagining into the future and what it would feel like to lose him, because of course the day will come -- but I would not represent it as having happened. I would not refer to my children in a poem if I didn't have any. I think it's fine to bend the picture to fit the artifice, but it's not okay to outright lie in a poem. A poem isn't fiction -- and it is about telling the truth. I don't think that necessarily forecloses on imagination -- okay, so my dad is alive, and I want to write a father-loss poem, so I make up a character whose father has died, and I imagine the experience in the guise of that character. I don't represent myself as having had the experience, if for no other reason than -- what if I were suddenly and inexplicably catapulted to fame overnight, and all these people kept coming up to me to give me their condolences? "Ha ha, sorry, just made it up!" What a jerk I would sound like. Unless it was made very, very clear that the speaker of a poem on such a topic was not myself, I would never write that kind of poem in first person.
I think a poet can make up anything he/she wants -- but personally, I draw the line at blatant misrepresentation of self and personal experience. Pretending to be a survivor of Hiroshima is right out, in my book. What about Lowell? I admire so much about his poems, but he did other egregious things, too, of course, like using Elizabeth Hardwick's letters verbatim in The Dolphin . . . I just think that there are means which poetry as an end doesn't justify.
Not that I'm an uber-literalist or anything. I did write a poem about my grandfather's death in which a number of more or less mildly surreal things happen, and I don't think any reader would be idiotic enough to say, "Whoa, some ghost dogs really came back to life? And you like, saw that?" But I just think that the effect of claiming to have had experiences -- and they're almost always traumatic experiences, which inevitably give the speaker a kind of automatic authority (like a guy I knew who used to begin every sentence with, "As a survivor of sexual abuse . . . " -- with the effect that nobody ever felt they could disagree with anything he said) -- well, it does what I just said: gives the writer/speaker an air of authority that's basically fraudulent. And, moralist that I am, I believe that that's an abuse of poetry.
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