January 2003 "Who Are You When You're Speaking, I?" Sherod Santos responds to questions from Andrew Mulvania - Also visit the Workshop Archives

SS: I'm always confused by these terms when they're applied to poetry in anything other than descriptive ways, as they are, I believe, in the reviews you mention. But as categorical terms, as terms that one might usefully apply to distinguish one kind of poetry from another, they seem to me based on highly suspect postulations, suspect from a historical, psychological, and generic perspective. But perhaps you can help me see them more clearly.

AM: I was thinking of something along the lines of Irving Howe's remark that a "confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life."

SS: Perhaps the key phrase in Howe's remarks is "would seem." One must concede that the notion of a confessional poem is always delimited by that qualification. For example, disregarding for a moment the ethical issues involved, I feel fairly certain that I could write a first-person poem (worthy or not) that would seem to be about some incestuous relationship I'd suffered as a child, that would seem to be written in a voice a reader might identify with my "private self," and that would seem to be drawn from events in my life as a "historical personage." The fact is, I never suffered such an experience, but how would you, as a reader, ever know for sure, one way or the other? Clearly we can't use our reading experience, our sense of how sincere or persuasive a poem seems, as any sort of reliable proof—any more than we can use our impression that a "moving picture" is actually moving, and not, in fact, an illusion created by the rapid projection of still photographs. But even setting aside that reservation, I still don't see how the terms Howe uses are useful in distinguishing one group of mid-century American poets from poets of earlier ages and cultures. Is it not equally accurate to say, for example, that Shakespeare's sonnets "seem to be [poems] in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life"? Can't that same description be applied to the Elegies of Propertius, the fragments of Sappho, the Odes of Horace? And hasn't this always been a feature of the lyric poem?

AM: You've stated elsewhere that your books were written at periods in your life when particular forces declared themselves as "imaginative preoccupations," and that you think of your books as "bracketed obsessions—bracketed by time or circumstance." Does this imply that at least you understand your work in terms of autobiography?

SS: It's just this sort of blurring of terms that bothers me about this argument. By what logic does one arrive at the conclusion that "imaginative preoccupations" or "bracketed obsessions" are synonymous with autobiography? And if one applies that logic, then one must ask what work of art is not, therefore, autobiographical? Are Cézanne's mountains at l'Estaque "autobiographical"? They certainly were an imaginative preoccupation and a lifelong obsession. Is Matisse's autobiography to be read in his palm trees? Or Milton's in "Paradise Lost"? Or Mozart's in his "Requiem"? Of course, one can always say "yes" to those questions, but once that's done then the term becomes meaningless, for it no longer serves to elucidate anything in particular.

AM: I was thinking more of the other parts of the statements I quoted—the parts where you say "those forces in my life had declared themselves," or obsessions "bracketed by time and circumstance." Don't these statements imply a connection between your concerns in the various books and the concerns of your life at the time of writing them?

SS: Yes, of course they do, but isn't that a given in any work of art? For a particular or "bracketed" period in Cézanne's life, the mountains at l'Estaque "declared themselves" as an obsession. And that obsession in his life was (perhaps inevitably) an obsession in his work. How could it be otherwise? But my question remains the same: Does this mean, therefore, that the paintings he made of those mountains are "autobiographical"?

AM: You once remarked that "explicitness is largely an illusion in poetry, just as three-dimensional space is largely an illusion in painting." Given that claim, how truthful can we assume you to be when speaking as an "I" in a poem not otherwise designated as a dramatic monologue or persona poem?

SS: I think it's a grave mistake to confuse explicitness with truthfulness when it comes to poetry. And I think it's an even graver mistake to confuse truthfulness with autobiographical fact. Poetry is, after all, a branch of imaginative literature. It's not journalism, it's not autobiography, and it's certainly not, in the religious sense, confession. In poetry, the truth we encounter is not the truth of fact, but the truth of experience. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that a poet's life necessarily suffuses a poet's work. But how it does that is a far more subtle, complex, and often sublimated affair than a purely biographical reading allows. After all, one of poetry's greatest charms resides in the mystery of what, without saying it, it somehow manages to say. And this occurs precisely because a poem's meanings are transmitted not through its literal sense, but through its meta-linguistic effects—the associative pattern of its images, the phonic spell and romance of its lines, the suggestive gulf that arises out of its resistance to interpretation. Which is another way of saying that, when it comes to the facts of a poet's life, "reticence" in a poem is often far more communicative than "explicitness." I suppose I'm simply stating the obvious, that arts rises out of the life but as something other, and something more, than a documentary record of that life.

Andrew Mulvania, a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia in 1999 and has been the recipient of Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellowships. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Poetry, The North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review, and he was a semi-finalist in the 2002 "Discovery"/The Nation contest. A scholarly article on the poetry of Charles Wright appears in the current issue of the Valparaiso Poetry Review.