Inadequate memory and the adequate imagination

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2003 by Reeve, F D

CONFESSIONAL POETS ARE GETTING A BUM rap. Billy Collins, appointed poet laureate in the summer of 2001, deplored that "autobiographical expression [had come] to occupy a central place in poetry." In his essay "My Grandfather's Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry," he quoted Auden's comment-"Who the hell cares about Anne Sexton's grandmother"-and suggested that "confession" and "autobiography" had become synonymous. More surprisingly, he said that there was "hardly an egotistical bump in the road" in the 1,365 years between Augustine's Confessions and Rousseau's. "Milton never wrote a poem about his mother . . . or any other relative," he asserted. Apparently he forgot the poem about the little niece "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" and probably he was so overwhelmed by the centrifugal force of the poetry that he overlooked the centripetal impulse behind the sonnets "How Soon Hath Time . . ." and "When I Consider . . ." Milton aside, of course in the period between the fourth century and the eighteenth there is a rich confessional literature which is not to be confused with the so-called "confessional" poetry that arose in the 1950s. From the beginnings of belief in a transcendent god to our very day, ranging from Bernard of Cluny's twelfth-century, 3,000-hexameter De contemptu mundi to Teresa of Avila's Life (1562-65) and Interior Castle (1577) and John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and including the work of the Puritans and of such different American poets as Anne Bradstreet and Thomas Merton, true confession has aimed at spiritual self-transformation. Over the same period, autobiographical expression has occupied a central place in poetic expression. After Augustine's came Boethius's poetic-prosaic De consolatione philosophiae (525), in which he protested the charges that landed him in prison. A powerful complaint, detailing his life and injuries, was Abelard's Historia calamitatum written not long before his death in 1142. Francois Villon's Lais (1456) and his Grand Testament (1461) are dynamic, personal poems with a note of tragic urgency, still serving as sources for the facts of his life. Of the grand sixteenth-century English poets' autobiographies none is more elegant than Edmund Spenser's famous sonnet sequence Amoretti and his Epithalamion (1595), the latter still the finest wedding poem in English. Populations swelled; literature developed; the list of autobiographers lengthened. Russian literature began with autobiography: Byzantine Vladimir Monomakh's personal Instruction of 1117 and the highly original, confessional, vernacular Autobiography of 1672 by Archpriest Avvakum, a native of Nizhny Novgorod. The more lives there were, the more stories there were to tell.

Imagination is recombinant memory. We can point backwards to who we are through what we've done, events organized by time and place, but who can say what figures will appear in the future?

Looking back in my mind I can see

The white sun like a tin plate

Over the wooden turning of the weeds;

The street jerking-a wet swing-

To end by the wall the children sang.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Its stars beckon through the frost like cottages

(Homes of the Bear, the Hunter-of that absent star,

The dark where the flushed child struggles into sleep)

Till, leaning a lifetime to the comforter,

I float above the small limbs like their dream:

I, I, the future that mends everything.

-Randall Jarrell,

from "The Elementary Scene"

The reversible timelessness of the imagination distinguishes it from the irreversible chronometry of memory and bends it toward the creation of art. The fatal flaw in a "confessional" poem is the supposition that the narrative sequence of the art is the same as the timed ordering of personal events. Such confusion never fazed the old Romantics, who, like Byron, simply invented a literary double to act out the role of "self" and left it to the commentators to decide how autobiographical a poem was. Modern "confessional" poets worked over their literal memories, turning their torments into captivatingly outrageous unbelievabilities:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

-Sylvia Plath, from "Lady Lazarus"

The life has replaced the poem; the poem has been reduced to the life. Or, we may say that the poem has become an advertisement for the life.

Collins holds Wordsworth responsible for the change, but "the preoccupation . . . with personal experience in poetry today," as Collins phrases it, doesn't date from the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads. (Even if it did, it wouldn't be Wordsworth's fault.) The difference between 1798 and 2001 is commercialism, the cultural force that persuaded Collins to join the likes of Tony Hoagland and Lawrence Raab in providing readers with instantly accessible poems-what one eminent poet has called "lounge poetry." The memory-driven poem which Collins repudiates, assuming it linked to a "less mediated form of personal revelation, often with wiggy psychiatric effects," is an artifact of the market-driven, consumer society. As a catastrophe elicits an outpouring of apocalyptic verse, so the reification of culture in the last hundred years, the photographic manipulation of visual facts, and the wars of the twentieth century, of which the longest was the World War 1914-45, have encouraged sensationalism. To emphasize the deviant, the dying, the ghoulish, the violent is to draw an audience. In the solitude of their homogenized worlds, people with little faith are on the lookout for everyone else's secrets. The "confessional" poet entertains with one kind of "truth"; the middle-brow popularizer temporarily satisfies with another.