[Clay Stockton]

Something one often hears when discussing narrative poems with their authors is a concern about "how it really happened." I am not able to discern any pattern controlling when this concern is or is not voiced, i.e., it doesn't seem to matter whether the poet is young or old, experienced or inexperienced, "good" or "not that good", or close to the subject matter or distant from it, either emotionally or in time. Some events just seem to request a faithful accounting--a request which, it seems to me, would turn poets into journalists.

By way of full disclosure, I'll mention that, for me personally, I always ignore such requests. I just write the poem as well as I know how, and let the facts fall where they may. I invent things to fill in the blanks, often not very consciously. But it occurs to me that ethical and even legal issues might arise from this practice, such as when making mention of the names of private citizens, or well-known businesses & products.

So I wonder: what are the ethical limits of poetic license?

Thoughts on the subject would be much appreciated.

--CS

[Susan McLean]

Clay,
There is more than one kind of truth, and sometimes they are in conflict with one another. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, makes up some details in telling a story--hence, the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses. However, there is some inner truth to the experience that the artist tries to get at. So I think we have to be very conscious of our motives in choosing to change details. If we change them to fit in with what we think our readers would expect or approve of, we may be being faithful to the cliché rather than to the truth. Telling the hard truths is part of our job, I think, and the part that takes the most courage.

I feel more sympathy for those who write about other (often famous) people out of an imaginative effort of identification than out of a desire to ride on the coattails of someone else's fame or notoriety. But art is also a matter of taste, so I accept that what works for me is not necessarily what works for others.

Susan

[Robert E. Jordan]

CS,

There are no ethical limits to poetic license. However, there are legal limits, and those limits vary from country to country.

In the United States, people in what's know as "the public eye, or called public persons" can be lied about, swore at, etc. Don't try it with a non-public citizen. In addition, the definition of a "public citizen" is a cause of disagreement.

In other countries, such as Britain, even the Prime Minister is protected from lies about him.

If you damage a business, there are civil penalties involved.

Bobby

[Sally Thomas]

It seems to me that the best narrative poems are ones which don't just "give an accounting" of an event or experience -- in fact, I think you can almost bet that when something happens in real life that makes you think, "Wow, this is such a great story, I've got to write a poem about it" -- or a novel, for that matter -- the resulting poem or novel is going to be lousy. As Clay correctly implies, poetry isn't journalism -- it is artifice, and it has to succeed as the artifice it is, if that makes any sense.

For instance, I remember David Mason's saying that that long poem he read at West Chester had been a problem for years and years -- he had received this amazing story, and had kept trying to write it as a poem, and it just wasn't working, until at last (and forgive me, David, if I'm not remembering this right), he came up with a voice -- a separate persona -- to tell the story, and also put it into "rhyme and stuff." I would guess that those two things -- inventing a character to tell the story, and thus distancing himself from it and making it more of a fiction; and focusing on the technical problems (which maybe shifted the story itself to the background for a while) -- made the poem come together as a poem, and not just as "this really cool story in lines."

I also think that literal details -- the color of her dress, the time of year, the name of the town, the names of the people involved -- are completely up for grabs. A poem -- I think -- has no obligation to be faithful to those kinds of particulars, and it's probably better for the poem if it isn't (especially if "January" sounds better in a line than "March"). But the truth of what happened -- one friend betraying another, the emptiness after someone dies, etc -- I think there's an obligation to be faithful to that. Although I don't know -- I remember once hearing Brad Leithauser read a poem about the night his daughter was conceived -- literal daughter, here on earth in the flesh -- in which he changed the entire scenario. Instead of wherever it was, he made it happen in a cabin in the woods, and I remember thinking that that was just weird. What, the actual event wasn't memorable enough? I just couldn't see the point, especially when writing about a person so close to him, in utterly fabricating an event so closely connected to that person. I mean, not that the event itself was fabricated, obviously -- but the cabin didn't seem in the least metaphorical. It sounded as though he just thought it sounded better to be having sex in a cabin in the woods than in whatever setting this particular sex had taken place in real life. As I say, I couldn't see the point -- although this was a long time ago, and if I read the poem again I might see a point . . .

Oh well . . . a good question, though, Clay. Thanks for bringing it up.

Sally

[Roger Slater]

In the United States, even a public figure may not be lied about if the teller of the lie knows it to be a lie, or recklessly disregards the truth. I'm not sure it matters to the thread, but I wanted to correct any misimpression that may have been left by an earlier post.

[Clay Stockton]

Bobby & Roger: thanks. Taken together, your posts give a clear picture of the legalities involved. I think they're germane, though I like to think that the ethics of the situation come first. And that's exactly what Sally's anecdote about Brad Liethauser goes toward.

I think we can all agree with Susan that poets have a certain obligation to tell the hard truths, and with Sally that poets have, let's call it, an aesthetic obligation to pick the little details that will make the poem work. Speaker, tone, the color of the dress, saying that April is the cruellest month even though the bad reviews came out in October . . . all that sort of stuff. But I'm more interested in the ethical obligations that poets may (or very well may not) find themselves needing to honor. I think that in the case of Mr. Leithauser & his many-splendored evening, those issues are probably pretty minor: it's between him and his daughter (and his daughter's mother!).

But I'm thinking about a couple test cases in specific:

For the longest time, scholars of Lowell took the prose "memoir" in Life Studies as autobiography. Finally, someone checked up on the details, and found out just how much Lowell invented--quite a lot, apparently. How crappy is that of Lowell? Is it crappy at all?

In the December 2003 issue of The Believer, I read about a literary hoax that some here have probably heard about already. (The article, titled in the magazine's inimitably understated style, was "Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!" by Michael Atkinson.) Apparently, some American dudes wrote poems from the point of view of survivors of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fair enough. But the poets in question concealed their true identities and passed off the poems as actual documents created by actual Japanese survivors. Some cried foul, some thought it yet another amusing of notification of "the death of the author." (The death of the Japanese being, apparently, of only ancillary concern.) To what extent are the so-called "Hyperauthors" acting like assholes?

Last example is a hypothetical posed by Atkinson in this article. What if, for example, we were to discover that Sharon Olds's father was alive and well and living on a cattle ranch in Montana, making money hand over fist by selling methane? Would this bother us? Would it make Olds's poems any less (insert opinion of Olds's work here)?

I don't think history cares what color Anne Gregory's hair really was. However, it should clearly care quite a lot that some smartasses in the American Midwest are posing as nuclear survivors.

But I'm curious how the gray areas work. Can we say what's out of bounds for fabrication, and what ain't?

--CS

[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited June 28, 2004).]

[Sally Thomas]

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.

[Fred Longworth]

Sally,

I say a poet has a right to write about any damn thing he or she wants to. You want facts, turn to journalism. Art obeys a different standard.

And I would love to see a first-rate poem written from the POV of a survivor of Hiroshima.

As for this (I am quoting you here): "I can't imagine pretending to have had experiences I haven't actually had, on one level or another." -- if you really believe this, there is absolutely no hope for you as a poet, because you have little or no faith in the power of imagination.

Fred

[Clay Stockton]

Well, having read even just one of Sally's poems-in-progress, I think she doesn't need much hope regarding her prospects as a poet, since she already is a poet, and a damned good one. I think that considerations of the ethics involved in fabricating details can be quickly, easily, & justly separated from one's aptitude for imagining details and rendering them well in poems. I would argue that all good poets have the requisite tools for being wonderful liars; the question here is what obligations to tell the truth encumber that capacity for inventing pretty lies.

I don't agree with Sally that poems are "not fiction." For one thing, in a certain sense all stories are fiction. But that's a little too esoteric (and explaining to the judge during one's libel trial about how all stories are fiction probably doesn't get one very far). I guess the reason I bring this up is to try to inspire some wariness of that "fiction"/"non-fiction" distinction. The trickiness, to me, is finding where one bleeds into the other and, more importantly, deciding what obligations one has to the "non-fictional" portion of the account. What can be fictionalized and what can't? I think Sally's point about "exploitation" may be the dividing line. Confessional poets seem instructive: I don't think anyone would begrudge Lowell for exploiting his own life story (the tale of being a fire-breating Catholic C.O. during WWII) but nearly all of us blanch at his use of Hardwick's letters. He exploited her.

But what if the exploitation doesn't effect a material gain or loss? What, specifically, about the dead? Are the Hiroshima survivors any more alive or dead for having some asshole in the Midwest write a book impersonating them? Or how about what Howard Stern (the radio shock-jock) used to do to his wife, spilling their intimacies on-air? What place is there in poetry for shock value, whether the shocks come from indiscreet factual information being pushed into poems (pace Lowell) or from invented details (Fred at Borders)?

The topic's related, I think, and might shed light on the ethics of using real people in verse.

--CS

[Fred Longworth]

What you are saying, Clay, is that, in light of Sally's work as a poet, she could not wholly mean what I cited in the quote.

Oh well, we all overstate our cases from time to time. Me too.

* * * * *

A poem should not betray a confidence, for example, a trade secret.

A poem should not plagarize the work of another poet.

A poem should not needlessly reveal something about another living party which could jeapardize their reputation or get them in legal trouble. (Suppose the Lustig family was keeping it a secret that their daugher, Sandy, had been raped at age 9. Further suppose that you became privy to confidential police documents. A poem called "The Rape of Sandy Lustig" published in a local poetry journal would be a violation of Sandy's right to privacy.)

A poem should not encourage the commission of a crime.


[This message has been edited by Fred Longworth (edited June 30, 2004).]