poetry + me = poeme.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”- Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”
Those of you who have spoken with me in, oh, the past year for longer than three minutes might have picked up on my professor worship of Dr. Davis. For those of you who haven’t suffered the weekly “Oh! In class? Dr. Davis said…” updates need only know this: he is the poet in residence at Baylor, my creative writing teacher, and makes a hobby out of saying things for me to repeat. One of the things he said in class has been rankling with me for awhile. I fear it’s true and it bothers me, for reasons I expect some of you with sympathize with. What I’m curious about is why it happens, if it indeed does. Dr. Davis posits that, usually, an author’s first novel is told in first person; likewise, earlier in a poet’s career, his or her poems will also be told in first person. Now, as any good writer/reader knows, an “I” or speaker isn’t the author — but with younger or newer poets, the gap between the “I” and the author is significantly smaller. Or so says The Davis.
Being the difficult soul I am, it isn’t surprising that from the day he said this until the end of the class, the most common critique of my work was, “Who is speaking? Why isn’t the person in the poem? The third person speaker is all wrong. Blah, blah, blah.” Of course. Because I didn’t want the rules to apply to me. Now, I gave up being the speaker in my poems a long time ago, but I still run to the “I” as a starting place — or at least I do when I’m not deliberately avoiding such things. And I think this is natural for most people. Is it something that we evolve past with age or maturity? Possibly. Empathy is certainly a watermark of maturity. But using “I” when speaking about someone else is strongly empathetic. Do we, with age and experience, move into more reflective, observational roles? Again, maybe. But that doesn’t seem the best or most complete explanation. So what of the “I” trend in younger writers? Equally interesting, why is there an implicit value in moving beyond the “I,” when a first-person speaker is a clear way of connecting with a reader. I’m curious for your input — especially since so many of my beloveds are writers also, but any of you are welcome to muse with me. As a starting point, I’ve included two short poems by Philip Larkin, my favorite. One includes a self-indicating speaker and the other does not. These aren’t from specifically later or earlier parts of his career, but they illustrate the change in tone that comes with an absent speaker. (NB: These are also just poems I could find on the web without too much digging. So.)
Water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
As Bad as a Mile
Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.
