Sincerity in Poetry

Poetry Recommendation: “Exiles” by Neil Shepard

Out of his collection The Book of Failures.

Exiles
(after Adam Zagajewski)

And don’t we all want a second life
in order to process the first one?

Don’t we all want a second childhood
refunded at the end of days?

My mother said, You’ll regret this for the rest of your life. I have.
My father said, Never too late to take over the business. It is.

My sister said, You betrayed me by running for the competition. I did.
My brother said, This trouble is partly your fault. It is.

My grandfather said, Wish I could live long enough to see what you become. He couldn’t.
My grandmother said, Wish I could live long enough to see you heal. She did.

When I was a metaphysician, I roundly criticized my students
for writing about their families. And now, I’m almost out of ideas,
except this one: write about family.

I eschewed elegies when I was young. Now, that’s all I write—
letters to family and friends with no conceivable forwarding address.

And yet… the sun continues to blue the atmosphere and green the trees…
and will until the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in a pyrotechnics
best seen from a parallel universe.

And yet… the green snake continues to shock me in the garden…
if not the bellwether salamanders, fireflies, bobolinks.

And yet… life is as gorgeous and ravenous as it always was…
and still there is no consolation.

I had the pleasure of taking a poetry class with Neil Shepard last year at Poets House, in Lower Manhattan. He runs a damn good workshop. Then I had the double pleasure of hearing Neil read this poem at the launch of his collection The Book of Failures. His poems are charged with wisdom, epiphany, surprise, and a level of authenticity that many poets aspire to, yet few achieve.

I’ll talk about authenticity later in this newsletter (with the help of Louise Glück), but before that I want to note a few craft elements in this poem:

• Each stanza’s evolving oppositions and tensions.
• The poem’s shifting anaphora and sentence structures.
• The poem’s radical return to where it begins.

The central power of each stanza is its tension and opposition. Running along each line break, you’ll find a challenge, complication, or opposition to each stanza’s first line. A couple of examples:

And don’t we all want a second life
in order to process the first one?

The first line on its own is provocative, but doesn’t actually carry much weight, until the second line surprises the reader and reveals a profound thought or feeling—a new take on “rebirth.” I haven’t had this thought before, and yet I agreed instantly. 

My mother said, You’ll regret this for the rest of your life. I have.
My father said, Never too late to take over the business. It is.

In addition to the mother/father opposition, there’s an opposition of time here. The first line looks forward, then backwards, in time: the speaker’s mother considers regret in the future perfect tense, and the following sentence agrees in the perfect tense. The father’s line is phrased and responded to in the present tense, yet also considers the past and future. So there’s a sense of universal regret, occupying past, present, future; mother and father.

And yet… the sun continues to blue the atmosphere and green the trees…
and will until the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in a pyrotechnics
best seen from a parallel universe.

The opposition here is, again, one of surprise, but also another one of temporality. The first line, in the present tense, is rooted in the Earth’s beauty; the following two lines, in future tense, imagines the Earth’s beauty destroyed by galactic collision. Both images are beautiful in opposite way, an irony that, I admit, made me laugh the first time I heard it. (This is also one of two tercets in the poem, with that third line practically winking at me with its irony.)

Paired with these evolving oppositions is an evolution in syntax. There are a few different sets of sentence structures happening in this poem. Roughly, in order of the poem:

• Two rhetorical questions.
• Three stanzas: a sentence quoting a family member, followed by a two word sentence in response.
• Two stanzas of different lengths exploring the irony of writing about family.
• Three stanzas beginning “And yet…”—an anaphora, also, of opposition. In these stanzas, the first line also ends in ellipses. The lines following these ellipses amplify the first lines’ sentiments, yet also further oppose them.

I don’t normally lay out in plain language the sentence structures of poems, but it feels important to do so in this one, because time is a central element of this piece, and one of the ways a poet controls time is by controlling sentences. Notice how syntax alters your reading of these lines, and perhaps read them out loud. To have two sentences in one line, for example, crunches time; to end the poem with a series of ellipses stretches it out. Here, yet another opposition.

Notice, also, the slow transition of past-looking to present-looking in this piece. The poem ends where it began—naming the lack of consolation implied in the opening two couplets. After charting the course of a lifetime, we return to the sentiment that sparked the poem:

And yet… life is as gorgeous and ravenous as it always was…
and still there is no consolation.

This sentiment feels radically altered, charged with meaning. Shepard sticks the landing here, a feat that many poets, including myself, struggle with, and he does so by transforming the poem’s initial insight into a moment of heartbreaking wisdom.

I’ll close by briefly mentioning the poem’s title. Why “Exiles”? I will note that the poem is after Adam Zagajewski, a Polish poet who was himself exiled at an early age from Poland by the Soviet Union. Trivia aside, the sense of exile is never named in the poem itself, yet pulses underneath the poem’s longing for life. Perhaps the speaker is exiled from time. Perhaps we all are—unconsenting observers to a life we live but can never fully participate in; ravaged by regrets and lives we never ended up living; ravaged by beauty, but never consoled by it, not least because of its inevitable loss.

Learn more about The Book of Failures by Neil Shepard here: https://madvillepublishing.com/product/the-book-of-failures/

Craft Perspective: “Against Sincerity” by Louise Glück

You can find a PDF of this essay here.

“Against Sincerity” is an essay I encourage every serious poet to read. The title is provocative (perhaps iconoclastic), but the essay isn’t saying poets shouldn’t be sincere; rather, it’s pushing back on the notion that a poem needs to stick to the facts in order to be authentic. The “truth” can be accessed without having to dutifully transcribe reality.

Glück, the 2020 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, helpfully differentiates three terms that are often used interchangeably, but perhaps shouldn’t be:

• Actuality: “The world of event.”
  • In other words: Things as they actually happened in the real world.
• Truth: “The embodied vision, illumination, or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art.”
  • In other words: The deeper realities which art reveals.
• Honesty or sincerity: “‘telling the truth,’ which is not necessarily the path to illumination.”
  • In other words: The desire to stick closely to “actuality” in one’s art.

These distinctions might seem a bit arbitrary or opaque, but they yield important insights into the nature of art versus reality. One bit of irony I love to tell poets is this: you might have to lie to tell the truth.

Art, including poetry, is, above all else, a distortion of reality. We’re not trying to convey every fact or detail or experience; to do so would be overwhelming and, quite frankly, boring. (An exception might be certain works of Modernism, such as Joyce’s Ulysses. Certainly not a boring work of literature, but it is rather dense and impenetrable in its efforts to convey life as it actually occurs.)

Rather, the artist or poet creates art by selecting, juxtaposing, and heightening or minimizing certain details. A photographer does this by changing lenses and editing colors; a musician does this by adding instruments or altering sounds or using autotune. A poet has the many tools of craft at their disposal.

So, the goal isn’t to convey life in excruciating detail, but rather to achieve a radical authenticity in the work. The poet should use whatever means necessary to do so.

This is not to say that you should deceive your reader. In fact, readers can usually tell when they’re being lied to. The goal is, above all, authenticity, which is something like a north star of poetry writing: follow it, and you’ll probably get to where you’re trying to go.

For example, I have a poem that was published at the beginning of this year called “Lepidoptera,” in which the speaker falls in love with the cryptid Mothman. This, obviously, never happened, though I certainly hope Mothman is out there. What I actually did was write about a crush I had on someone in college, but I replaced the person with Mothman and followed the metaphor accordingly. (This would be a good time to point out: craft techniques like metaphors can reveal, but they can also abstract from reality—I’ve learned that craft can be both a shield and a mirror. When given the choice, opt for the mirror.)

The reason Neil Shepard’s poem strikes me so deeply is its radical authenticity. Is the speaker lying, embellishing, or distorting at any point? I can’t say, but if he is, it is not done inauthentically. I recognize the poem’s truth because of its insight and epiphany, because it successfully shifted my perspective, and because I can feel the pain and power of life itself emerging underneath the poem’s tensions and oppositions.

When you have the time, read Glück’s essay in full. It’s thought provoking and provides a cool window into Glück’s mind of poetry. In your own work, you can write or edit towards authenticity by:

• Comparing your poem’s draft to your feelings and experiences. Do they match? Where does the poem feel off? What feels missing? This requires a certain level of objectivity, and many rounds of revision.
• Experimenting with craft and form. How can you use the tools of poetry to represent, on multiple levels, your feelings and experiences?
• Writing from the body. Can you transmit your embodied experience into the poem, so that other readers can feel it in their bodies, too?
• Knowing what to cut. What parts of your poem aren’t relevant to the truth you hope to convey?
• Being genuine with yourself.

This last tip is the hardest thing to do for any artist, because people have a knack for deceiving themselves. One trick is to write your first draft with one audience member in mind, either yourself or someone you trust completely with your unfettered authenticity. Let yourself be radically vulnerable: be embarrassing, flawed, intense, imperfect, and unabashedly you. The poem may just reveal itself from there.