Confessing to Oranges

We are given over to confession. As we give our bodies to another to be a part of another one, to be concentrated on an act so that we can be larger than we are and a part of the luminous and material world, we also give away our secrets, one by one, and over time. They slip out of our bodies through our mouths and through our eyes, by the movements of our fingers, as we use words, as we speak with our bodies, and as these words slip out of us in this way, we say we secrete them. Because they are secrets. And the dearest secrets are the ones we most baldly let out, without accepting, without acknowledging, that they are indeed secrets and about us, because they were once a part of only us and now they are set free.

We live in an unacknowledged age of confessional poetry, and nobody admits it, because it is a secret no-one ever admits, because it goes against our imagined dream of the poetry we want to write. We imagine the dispersion of self, the word given way to the purity of denotation without emotion, the word given away to removal from denotation, the word as a pure and inviolable fact unaffected by the movements of the human heart and spleen. But there is no such thing.

I spoke to a poet last month and only yards south of a great lake and on a cold night, cold enough for me to accede to gloves and a scarf, and he said his working life was not about words because he didn't want to mix the methods and materials of his work with his art, he wanted to keep certain tools (writing and words) only for poetry. But I asked him how, how could he hope to separate language into nothing but art. I said that we use the words of poetry, the same words, to ask someone to hand us a roll of toilet paper. And I thought to myself, It is the fact that words are what we use every day to keep us alive, to give away our secrets, to make our lives work and that we still use them in some heightened way for poetry, it is for this reason that poetry is something remarkable.

I learned at the moment of speaking this fact, at the moment of rejecting another's thought about poetry, at that point I learned that I had, in my gentle but direct way, been rude, rude to a person and to an idea. I had confessed the truth.

All of it good. Because this is an age of confessional poetry, even if some of the confessions are false or invented or fictional, even though we will never know which are mere fact, which are alterations or enhancements of fact, and which are total fabrications. And we most easily verify today's confessional poets as we have always recognized them: by the fact of their denials that they are confessional.

W.D. Snodgrass rejected the term and, maybe even, its fact, yet "Heart's Needle," a shaky bit of prosody to our contemporary ears, still hurts even us, the dumb and stupid readers, because of the details of the confession and our ability to empathize, our tendency to convert words into the emotion they're meant to mean. John Berryman (né Smith) famously said, in the preface to The Dream Songs, "The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry." "Henry" is the poetic form of "John"; Berryman's dream songs follow him across the country and the world, they repeat facts of his life, they leave him (whichever he it is) with regrets about his relationship with his daughter by the end. And there were so many others of these poets.

But there have been confessional poets since the awakening of the idea that a human being could be an individual uniquely different from all others. Keats was confessional. Whitman was. Shakespeare's sonnets are confessional. I'd have a hard time assuming Matthew Arnold wasn't. It is a way of being and has been for centuries. We see through our own eyes, and we accept poetry as a personal way of communicating and, thus, we communicate something about ourselves through the process of its creation.

Before I make my points about the book I have in mind to discuss today, let me think of who might be a few of the confessional poets of our time. Just a few of them. There is my friend Tom Beckett, philosopher-poet, but who is also and intensely a poet of the personal—deeply and achingly personal—and sexual confession, even though he is rarely confessing to anything besides a questioning of the bounds of desire.

My friend Lynn Behrendt, who once said while being interviewed by Tom Beckett himself,

Our mutual friend, Geof Huth, recently said that he's decided my poetry is Confessional. This characterization could be considered a terrible insult in certain poetic circles though Geof, of course, did not say it with any hint of malice. So I asked him if there could be such a thing as Post-avant Confessional. His response: "Apparently so." I don't think there is such a thing, and I don't believe my work is Confessional, but I can see how it might be read that way.

I never use the term "post-avant" myself (though I enjoy its contradiction: "after-before"), but I know what she means, and I know her poetry is confessional. Why? Because it confesses, because part of the beauty of her work, which is built upon an amazing ability to bring unexpected words together into conjunctive disharmony, is the power of the confession, which is the power of the feeling she allows us to experience. People's reaction to her work is, clearly, in significant part, a response to this confession. There is such a thing as post-avant confessional poetry, and it is good and powerful.

Even in my own house, my wife Nancy, who is sometimes NF Huth and sometimes Nancy Huth, is a confessional poet. Read her poems, which are too hard to find, I admit, and you will hear the value of the confessional, which is not the value to the poet—who cares about that? It is the value of the experience offered up to the reader. Nancy writes beautiful quirky work, but most of it is confessional. It is about her life, often very obliquely, and about the tribulations and joys of that life. Even joy is a confession.

I don't consider myself a post- or even a pre-avant or avant- poet. I am just a poet and try to do many things beneath the awkward glow of that epithet. But I have always accepted the fact and efficacy of the confession. I was once, after all, Catholic and, thus, accept the need to accept one's iniquity through the ablution of the confession. I began this blog with the subtitle "Visual Poetry and Personal Experience" because I accept the value of personal experience in a poem, though I, of course, don't accept it as a required value. Great poetry can be confessional or not, and my poetry occasionally is confessional in painful, though sometimes secret ways, though usually my poetry has nothing to do with me but with my obsession with language.

We are all confessional poets, and I will add to our group Maureen Thorson, a poet I missed the opportunity to meet recently, and one whose first book, Applies to Oranges, seems to me one of the best exemplars of the new and continuing confessional poetry.

But it is much more than that, and I'll discuss those many values as well, as part of this creaky overview of my thoughts on contemporary confessional poetry.

I am drawn to beauty, and if poetry is not somehow beautiful, even if in ugly or disquieting ways, then it cannot work as it must. There are many ways to achieve beauty, and Maureen Thorson's is one of the most direct. The beauty of her deft yet simple words, the beauty of her conjunctions of thought and action, the beauty of repetition, the ineffable beauty of loss, the beauty of repetition, the beauty of loss. I was captivated by the first words of this narrative, for it is a narrative, one about the aftereffects of a relationship broken, though it is about the ways the entire world infests any event, how nothing happens in isolation, how isolation is impossible even when it's most sharply felt.

And this book is a confessional even if the facts of the story itself, which make up a minority of the text itself, are not the facts of Thorson's life.

Applies to Oranges is a book of fifty-nine one-stanza poems. These poems vary in number of lines, from about twelve to fourteen, but each of them essentially resembles a sonnet upon the page. They sound Shakespearean to me, ending, often enough, in a couplet or in two lines imaginable as a couplet, but one that doesn't tie up the story of the preceding many lines but which gives them, usually, a denouement, a real ending, a hint at a conclusion of a thought, an almost or certain resolution. So it is that the poems go forward, page after lovely page, referring sometimes to an absent auditor, a "you" that never takes full form.

The opening poem of the book immediately tells us the book is a narrative of a breakup, but also a remarkable piece of writing:

I'd rather tell you a better story, but
disease and boredom and a bad connection
brought that plan to night. You took off
with the oranges and spiders,
the ending and the plot, and left me
with the Zenith's chrome housing,
the cruise ships in their moorings.
The tender tourists with their trinkets
and tight-fisted maps. The orphans
and beachheads, so lovelorn and solemn.
The satellites' red signals. The hotel's
common gestures. Once you were gone,
there were only these few things left.

This opening poem is a microcosm of the entire book to follow. The poem opens and closes with a direct address to the absent auditor, whoever it is, whether real or imaginary. The construction of the poems is clear here: almost unrelated sentences strung together in gentle parataxis, a reference to a self and another person, and certain words that reappear, again and again, as recycled memories. The most repeated of these words is "orange," which appears in its singular and plural forms, or as part of a compound word, in every single poem.

This repetition is itself illuminating and somehow a brave act of writing. All poets have words they fall back on, touchstones that they repeat even when they try not to, words that have bored into their souls and consciousnesses and cannot be rid from the body, and most poets try to avoid these repetitions, to worry that the repetition will weaken the poetry. But Thorson has decided to treat these words as reverberating talismans, little lights left on throughout the pages of the book. Reminders of the past we've just seen, these repeated words ("orange," "Zenith," "orphans," "spiders," "satellites," "rivers," "shadows," "night") serve as tiny repetends throughout the poem. And the forty-first poem of the book, which appears on the 41st page, refers to this compulsion towards certain words: "Once I suffered / by a fetish for certain words: Morocco, / Carbine, Amor" and then, "But those words are as distinct as oranges / held in different hands" and "I had a secret instead of a message." Yet these poems are messages about secrets.

It is not, however, confession alone that makes a poem run. The poem has to depend on the means of telling, as well as what's told, and that gives the poem the means to be right or righted or seen right. I see this articulate telling in the delicate opening of the sixth poem of the book (all the poems are untitled):

At first, heartbreak made me beautiful
My skin fluoresced. I hypnotized trees.

and in its disturbing yet beautiful conclusion:

I want to diagram the light that shines out
through the holes you pricked in me.

with its sense of tiny violences and sexual punning. The language of the poem is imaginative, sometimes neologistic, and the imagery surprising, yet it all comes at us with its pain suffused through a little orchestra of sound and image, the sounds of the words in our heads and the images those unheard sounds create there.

The book carefully moves through the processes of reacting to a breakup, though saying that makes it seem as if the book is, somehow, trite or unseemly, but it is nothing of the sort. The pain of this narrated experience is clear, but it is also muted, almost gauzy, as if a secret still being kept. The book opens with the first sense of loss, goes through, in fragmented ways, the memories of a life together, makes real a continuing yearning the narrator has for the distant auditor, and even begins to look at what can go wrong in a relationship (from the thirty-eighth poem):

The bass ripples my heart, turns it tender,
just the way you once let your body down
to mine. That was when I opened
like an orange, as a child might open it—
thumbs in, fingers splayed,
and then the whole thing rips apart.

And the book ends with acceptance, for maybe the steps of recovering from a ruptured relationship are the same as those for accepting an inevitable and imminent death.

So the book ends: "the things that fail are the only things that stay."

And the book ended. Or I finished the book, yet it stays with me. I've been haunted by it for weeks, and the thought of oranges has become for me the marker of a loss that is deep and personal and unavoidable and painful, and beautiful, in its own twisted way: for the reason that it shows us how we are human, and thus vulnerable, and thus made to seem invincible by the power of our perseverance and the workings of our magical minds in the face of it.

Yes, there is confessional poetry nowadays, and it is personal and painful, and it is lyrical, but it is not simply about the self, and it is not a kind of writing that is not imaginative and forward-look and different and vital. It is not the future, though. But that is only because it is the present.

And a gift.

_____


Thorson, Maureen. Applies to Oranges. Ugly Duckling Presse: Brooklyn, N.Y., 2011.

ecr. l'inf.