The Poets Aren't Alright
by Roseanna Alice Boswell
Some years ago, during my MFA in Ohio, I attended a reading for the graduating Creative Writing majors at the university. One of the students presenting his work read a poem about the lack of trauma the speaker had experienced in their life. Essentially, the poem was a lament for the good relationship that existed between the speaker and their father, the logic being that if the father had been abusive, the speaker’s poetry would have been better. Deeper.
I remember sitting there next to my then-boyfriend absolutely seething. How dare this twenty-year-old bro capitalize on trauma in this way? How dare he make light of pain and abusive fathers?
It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me that this student had not invented this idea. He didn’t wake up one day thinking that the creation of great art required (demanded even) great pain. This ideology was given to him, most likely in a creative writing workshop, or a careless comment, or he just breathed it in like so many of us have.
I remember sitting there next to my then-boyfriend absolutely seething. How dare this twenty-year-old bro capitalize on trauma in this way? How dare he make light of pain and abusive fathers?
It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me that this student had not invented this idea. He didn’t wake up one day thinking that the creation of great art required (demanded even) great pain. This ideology was given to him, most likely in a creative writing workshop, or a careless comment, or he just breathed it in like so many of us have.
Around the same time as this reading, I was thinking a lot about Sylvia Plath. Her poem “Sheep in Fog,” was highly influential on my thesis. I couldn’t stop thinking about how young she was when she died, not so much older than I was then. About the age I am now.
I think about herstill, more and more the closer my thirtieth birthday gets. I think about her and I feel her loss, and I feel how young and stupid I am still.
I have heard the sentiment before that good artists burn out quickly. That there is something inherently self-destructive about creating art that lasts. The idea is, the pain that makes us able to create will eventually kill us.
People might not say this to you, but they think it, and they see it. Once, after hearing me read at a poetry reading my sister told me she always feels like she has to ask poets if they’re okay.
In Ohio, many of the poets drank a lot––to excess. We were trying to feel less lonely, or less anxious, or just less. We barely slept. No one suggested to us that this was hurting us. There was a sense that this is how one poets. This is how we write the good stuff. We hurt and we let that hurt on to the page and we see how long we can make it.
I wonder what sort of poetry that college student from Ohio writes now. I wonder what sort of pain he has felt obligated to let fester for the sake of a better poem, a better line. Was I really mad at him for capitalizing on pain, or was I angry that he wasn’t hurting authentically enough for my own sensibilities? I don’t know, and it makes me ashamed now to even have to wonder.
There are a lot of problem with the marriage of pain and art, pain and poetry. The first being that it is unsustainable. If we as artists are always trying to lean into our pain, to feel it all, all the time, how will we survive? Are we creating a legacy of brevity, of burning out stars? My second issue is that this seems to suggest that only pain that begets art matters. That it is the only pain worthy of notice. Leslie Jamison in her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” writes:
I think about herstill, more and more the closer my thirtieth birthday gets. I think about her and I feel her loss, and I feel how young and stupid I am still.
I have heard the sentiment before that good artists burn out quickly. That there is something inherently self-destructive about creating art that lasts. The idea is, the pain that makes us able to create will eventually kill us.
People might not say this to you, but they think it, and they see it. Once, after hearing me read at a poetry reading my sister told me she always feels like she has to ask poets if they’re okay.
In Ohio, many of the poets drank a lot––to excess. We were trying to feel less lonely, or less anxious, or just less. We barely slept. No one suggested to us that this was hurting us. There was a sense that this is how one poets. This is how we write the good stuff. We hurt and we let that hurt on to the page and we see how long we can make it.
I wonder what sort of poetry that college student from Ohio writes now. I wonder what sort of pain he has felt obligated to let fester for the sake of a better poem, a better line. Was I really mad at him for capitalizing on pain, or was I angry that he wasn’t hurting authentically enough for my own sensibilities? I don’t know, and it makes me ashamed now to even have to wonder.
There are a lot of problem with the marriage of pain and art, pain and poetry. The first being that it is unsustainable. If we as artists are always trying to lean into our pain, to feel it all, all the time, how will we survive? Are we creating a legacy of brevity, of burning out stars? My second issue is that this seems to suggest that only pain that begets art matters. That it is the only pain worthy of notice. Leslie Jamison in her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” writes:
Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy slept with her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. (Jamison)
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I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy, either, and I extend that to myself now. I no longer buy this ideology of pain and art. I no longer accept that they need to be married. This hasn’t made any of my pain go away, of course, and I haven’t stopped writing about my family, my relationship to my body and sex and religion and health. But I have started going to therapy, and I have started disagreeing when I hear people say things about poets always being in pain. I have started telling my writer friends that they deserve to care for themselves first, and write the poem second, or later, or never.
Eavan Boland talks about the obligation women poets have totell our stories. Hers is a command geared toward the survival of a community. In “The Woman Poet and Her Dilemma” she writes:
Eavan Boland talks about the obligation women poets have totell our stories. Hers is a command geared toward the survival of a community. In “The Woman Poet and Her Dilemma” she writes:
I believe that if a woman poet survives, if she sets out on the distance and arrives at the other end, then she has an obligation to tell as much as she knows of the ghosts within her, for they make up, in essence, her story as well. (Boland)
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I’m not sure that I would go as far as to call this an obligation, but I do know something about being haunted. I know I want to offer something else to poets who come after me, apart from my ghost. Something about kindness. Something about letting yourself off the hook when all you can do is survive and not write about it at all.
Last summer, after thinking about Ohio, and that college student whose father loves him, and Sylvia Plath feeling alone and hopeless, and seeing my brilliant writer friends decide how much to hurt on the page and ask themselves whether their art will suffer if they take better care of themselves, I was finally able to make a poem about all of this and it felt like a kind of birth. A stillness of recognition: here I am; this is what I want you to know about being a poet. This is how the poem ends:
Last summer, after thinking about Ohio, and that college student whose father loves him, and Sylvia Plath feeling alone and hopeless, and seeing my brilliant writer friends decide how much to hurt on the page and ask themselves whether their art will suffer if they take better care of themselves, I was finally able to make a poem about all of this and it felt like a kind of birth. A stillness of recognition: here I am; this is what I want you to know about being a poet. This is how the poem ends:
…Why should the word
epitaph sound so alluring or soft when it is a stand-in for all possibility. The infinite hush of past tense. I’m looking for roundness again in all the wrong places, the arc of a satisfied breath but the moon is just a young slip of a girl tonight. She writes poems, then eats them. Her autopsy finds the remains. Thank god, we were able to save her. |
Roseanna Alice BoswellRoseanna Alice Boswell is the author of Hiding in a Thimble (Haverthorn Press, 2021) and Imitating Light (Iron Horse Literary Review, 2021). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Roseanna is a Ph.D. student in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in: RHINO, Whiskey Island, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Originally from upstate New York, Roseanna now haunts Oklahoma with her husband and their cats, Bean and Blossom.
Website // roseannaaliceboswe.wixsite.com/poet Twitter // @swellbunny Instagram // @swellbunny |