Such a Lonely Word

I have so far tried to write this post three times today, and each time I have accumulated an awful lot of sententious sentences that say very little, and certainly nothing interesting. This is unfortunate for me, because I have wasted a lot of time that I should have used for other things, but it is fortunate for you, because even if the rest of this post is awful, it's not as awful as it could have been.

I teach English at a boarding school (a high school), and this afternoon we had a department meeting about what student-written poem to give the department award to, an award designed to honor the best piece of writing in the school literary magazine (which this year contained, for one reason or another, only poetry).

One of my colleagues offered a nomination and said that though the poem was not as subtle or formally interesting as some others up for consideration, he perceived that the writer was writing about his or her own life, and that it was honest. And, he said, he valued honesty.

I slammed my fist onto the table and disagreed. "I detest honesty!" I said, somewhat to my own surprise.

My colleagues are used to ignoring my odder outbursts, and so they continued as if I had said nothing. Eventually, though, somebody said, "You know, I'm with Matt. I could have lived with a bit less honesty in most of these poems."

I seized the opportunity for another outburst: "Art is about shaping things, it's about craft and deliberation, skill and surprise. It's not a therapy session. I'm so tired of poets who say, 'Here is my heart on a platter -- eat it, for it is a poem, and should be savored, because it is honest!' Such people should be tossed out windows and mocked viciously!"

This outburst scared everyone, and the meeting ended quickly. Someone pointed out to me that the poem I voted for, and which did not win, was not the most formally elegant, and therefore my actions contradicted my outbursts. This would only be true, I said, if I had voted for the poem because of whatever I perceived to be its "honesty", and I had not. I voted for it because I liked how some of the words worked together, and in the end that's what I most care about.

Novels, for me, are a different critter from poetry, because I go to novels wanting something more than language. I'm happy with a poem that is simply an interesting set of words, but in fiction of any sort I want the words to be signifiers for something more than themselves (while also remaining marvelous in and of themselves). I want fiction that does things only fiction can do, whatever those things are -- and I don't claim to know, because I like to be surprised, and I certainly don't think writers have plumbed all the depths of what fiction is and can be, although a few have dug artesian wells. If something could be done just as well, or better, as a poem or a play or a movie or a painting or a video game, it doesn't hold as much interest for me as does a short story or a novel that is unimaginable as anything other than itself -- a story or novel that would be unrecognizably altered or diminished by being adapted into another form.

Why is any of this important? I'm not sure that it is. But if you're going to be watching us rant and rave about books here, you should probably know what some of our biases are.

In other words, I'm trying to be honest.

Comments

[Niall]

Hmm. I tend to use honesty in a different sense when talking about writing. I tend to mean something along the lines of 'truthful about human experience and emotion'; it has nothing, or at least very little, to do with the author's personal experiences. I would call Air an honest novel, for instance. What you seem to be describing here is what I would call confessional writing, which I agree can be tiresome.

And tangentially, on the subject of adaptation, I think that while moving from (say) page to screen necessarily sacrifices some virtues, a good adaptation will make up for them with others, because there are some things that the screen can do better than the page.

[derikb]

There are plenty of crappy novels/short stories that were made into films of high quality.

[Matt Cheney]

Yes, honesty can definitely have multiple meanings and implications, and I'm using a fairly specific one here. "Truth" seems to me different, and is, indeed, one of the things most of us like to feel in a work of art, although one person's truthfulness may be another's idea of pretentious, artificial drivel. Not exactly a cut-and-dried issue...

Adaptations can, indeed, be marvelous. For me, at least, even good adaptations of good books are different experiences. Bad adaptations of good books are annoying, good adaptations of bad books are marvelous. Plenty of people have said over the years that the best movies seem to come from mediocre books, and though this isn't a rule, there are certainly plenty of examples.

[Justine]

...I would say the operative word in 'confessional poetry' is *poetry*. In other words: something crafted, shapely. A piece of artifice that has the illusion of being easy and natural. A thing with value in and of itself, apart from whatever "this really happened to me" story the writer attaches to it (as my old writing group used to remind each other on a regular basis: Just Because It Happened To You Doesn't Make It Interesting).

I like confessional poetry; I don't like rambling diary entries/therapeutic exercises that writers try to pass off as confessional poetry, in this belief that 'art' is self-expression, nothing more.

Maybe just once, high school poets should be encouraged to lie like mad. Or write about something that happened to somebody else...

[ladysankofa]

My students nearly fall off the floor when they tell me, in reaction to my dislike of one of their "poems" (and I use the term loosely), "But it's just what I meant to say! That's just how it happened! It's real! It's from my heart," and I tell them I DON'T CARE if it's "from their heart". I want something that's going to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and frankly, hearing about their own little soul-searching problems just doesn't do it. If that's all they want from their "poems" they should just keep it in a journal and leave it in the sanctity of their rooms.

Heartless? Possibly. But I'm sick to death of anyone with a pen thinking that they can write poems because "it's so easy to just put down what you think."

Thank God it's the end of the semester :)