Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant

I used to have the lucky pleasure of walking to my university office. Then I had some major abdominal surgeries and spent almost a year in and out of hospital. The time in bed ate up a medical leave plus a sabbatical; it also ate up much of my muscle mass and stamina. When I returned to full-time teaching, I no longer had the fibre to make that forty-minute walk twice a day. I started taking the bus instead.

Public transit in any large city involves a roll of the cosmic dice. Sometimes the ride is on time, warm when it’s cold outside, and bumpily efficient. Other times there are delays, detours, service outages. Almost always there are crazies, tweakers, fizzing anger, malodorous bodies, and violence. The bus I take, the 94A/B along Wellesley Street in downtown Toronto, routinely offers a bustling Boschian spectacle. The coach is often standing-room-only with saddies, drunks, sufferers, and other assorted social cast‑offs. They seem to board laden with grievances, afflictions, and apparatus: walkers, scooters, big rally bags, bundle buggies, oversized backpacks. It’s like the last train out of a crumbling regime.

My manner of coping with this scene, apart from a surgical mask, is poetry. I’m not the only non-phone reader; the bus passes a very good collegiate high school and later a Catholic girls’ school. I see Atwood and Rowling now and then. But I think I might be the only 94 patron ever to board with a pocket-sized paperback of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, that cherished Seamus Heaney hardcover, nice laid-paper editions of Louise Glück and Paul Vermeersch, or a signed and well-thumbed copy of Christian Bök’s neo‑Oulipan masterpiece Eunoia.

I sit there, jostling with the refugees and various schnooks, thinking these word-by-word thoughts: “I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks / and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk. / Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?” Or “All year the flax-dam festered in the heart / of the townland, green and heavy headed / flax had rotted there, weighed down by huge sods.” Or “When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark / seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees / thick with many lights.” Or “The future will be old and used. It will leak / from weakening joints, and the steam / seeping from worn-out hosepipes / will refract the holographs of the dead.” Or perhaps “Whenever Helen feels these stresses, she trembles. She / frets. Her helplessness vexes her. She feels depressed / (even when her cleverest beekeepers fetch her the / freshest sweets). She feels neglected (even when her / shrewdest gemseekers fetch her the greenest jewels).”

High school was the last time I took such regular bus trips. I commuted to a Catholic boys’ school during the week, both ways in the Manitoba winter dark, on part of the Perimeter Highway. Then on weekends too, when I ventured to the safe parts of downtown Winnipeg, many long blocks eastward along Portage Avenue from my dull suburb to the bookstores and hobby shops. Here I acquired the discount science fiction mass-market paperbacks, plastic hot‑rod models, and Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia that populated my nerd’s imaginative universe. In those days, I loved the feeling of tucking into a rear seat of the heaving bus, opening one of those lurid-covered little books — Edgar Rice Burroughs or C. S. Lewis or Isaac Asimov, as it might be — and losing myself in a world away from the slush outside and the smell of diesel fuel inside.

These days my rides are shorter. Poetry seems like the apt mental soundtrack for the dingy Wellesley Street corridor, with its towering public housing projects and dips through the old heart of the Gay Village. Because of the O’Hara, I think of that scene in Mad Men when Don Draper is day drinking in a Manhattan bar and a stranger beside him is reading Meditations in an Emergency. It’s the original stark, typography-only cover. O’Hara’s book becomes a kind of personal talisman, an essential part of Draper’s false-identity shadow narrative.

Is there always an emergency? Will poetic meditation ever save us? On the bus, fixed on grab poles, there are little red buttons that you press when it’s your time to quit the rolling carnival. A sign illuminates up front with a friendly ping: “Stop Requested.” This is a kind of panic button, I sometimes think: Get me off this demonic conveyance! I ask that this state of things should stop. Close your book and open the door, step into traffic.

Poetry can save your sanity, maybe. Can it save your life?

About a decade ago, my niece Aidan was in high school in a suburb of Chicago. She went to a large Catholic school with a stiff academic reputation, an old-fashioned dress code, an all-city football team, and a fearsome squadron of guidance counsellors who made sure every graduating senior got into the Ivy League, California, or Big Ten school of their choice.

Aidan was a surly teenager. She had executed an awkward shift from girlie fan of all things pink to a mouthy miniature goth with a talent for guitar. The only time I ever saw her happy was when she was playing and singing her band’s cover version of “Gold on the Ceiling.” She complained a lot. As a guest in my brother’s Oak Park house, I wrote this off as routine teenage angst. But Aidan was really ill — more than I realized.

The Library of Congress runs a program every year in which American high school students are invited to write “letters about literature.” They’re supposed to say why literature matters to them. The contest produces the expected array of self-conscious missives but also, more often than one might think, manages to tap a deep well of adolescent suffering. Aidan’s letter was to Mary Oliver, whose poem “When Death Comes” had struck a chord with her.

The work, from 1991, is a late-career meditation by the Pulitzer-winning poet, whose graceful existential lyrics are much anthologized. The lines include this often quoted plea: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” The sentiment feels made-to-measure for memorial services, I suppose, and has certainly been sounded at many.

But Aidan’s young soul also heard the call. Her letter was later published in its entirety, so I can quote it here:

She continued, picking at the wound of her despair:

It is impossible for me to read these words, even after the passage of some years, without a feeling of sick dread — of the suffering that I could not see but also of the things that may be deferred but can be healed.

Aidan found her toughness in lines from Oliver’s poem: “When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder / if I have made of my life something particular, and real. / I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, / or full of argument. // I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

The poem’s voice offers solace in engagement, a crooked love of the world. And so too did teenage Aidan, who concluded her letter this way:

I should say that my lovely, troubled niece was in fact receiving treatment for depression during this time, but no support — as she explained — seemed equal to her own self-hatred. None of the listeners seemed to get what she was trying to say. That includes me. The writing here is full of insight and eloquence that I found hard to connect to the grumpy young woman who sat in silence at family dinners.

Her letter, celebrated in her school competition, was put forward at ever higher levels. She won the statewide Letters about Literature contest and was invited to meet the Illinois governor at the capitol building in Springfield. Then, as the state winner, she was entered in the national competition — which she also won. In July of 2015, the Washington Post ran an article with the headline “How a Poem Helped Save a Suicidal Teen’s Life.”

By this stage, Aidan and her heartfelt correspondence seemed, if anything, more disconnected than before. The letter had taken on a life of its own, becoming an object lesson in the independence of the text over its author. It had grown bigger than the person, and its already somewhat performative quality — its feeling of being, rather uncomfortably, a writerly response to another writerly text — was only amplified as it was reproduced. I want to say that the letter won this competition, not that my niece did.

I think that she, the living and breathing Aidan, would agree. The voice of her letter is real — there is no denying it — but it is also a kind of stance or pose that she was able to adopt at the time, in the circumstances. It is not the voice of her face-to-face speech or even of her other writing. Her emails to me since then, from undergraduate engineering studies at Michigan and from a research post in Holland studying climate change, are as spiky and odd as ever. I can’t hear the quiet despair and soft pleading of the letter to Mary Oliver. But then the emails are to me, and I am not a poet.

All writing is, to be sure, some kind of assumed performance. But that judgment, that there is a kind of caesura between author and text, so often remarked upon, nevertheless troubles me, here and elsewhere. The misgivings are especially acute in a situation where one voice, the poet’s, seems to captivate and salve the bruised soul of another, the reader’s. When that reader becomes in turn a writer — well, can anyone capture the miracle of this, even the participants, never mind a newspaper journalist working at several removes? You will find no real answer to the how of this moment of salvation in the Post article, in other words, despite its headline. (It is amazing how many newspaper headlines promise such a how without ever delivering it.)

The mystery I am talking about is as old as the written word: the magical alchemy of marks upon a page, altering consciousness by capturing the voice of one self and so shaping the warp and woof of another. Graphemes with a strange power, runes and hieroglyphs of the human mind — how about that?

I think this is why I read poetry, really. I sometimes think I am the last non-poet of my acquaintance who actually does. I know there must be others, but it often feels as though time has winnowed the population of lovers. Did we not all cherish the song in youth? Or was it just me and all my English-major friends?

Poetry triumphs despite itself, despite all the drawbacks of the actual poetry world: the painful small-venue events, where the readings go on far too long, or the tiresome internecine battles carried out in what a friend of mine used to refer to, without irony, as “Poetry Twitter”— as in “Poetry Twitter went crazy last night after that piece was published in The New Yorker.” I won’t speak of those excruciating poetry slams of yore, where second-rate versifiers would try to make their words mean by slashing their hands through the air for emphasis — pah pah — holding that rapper’s microphone oh-so-close to their — pah bap parp — mouths. Parp bah.

Yes, in the face of all that and more external threats — mainstream disdain, rapidly deteriorating attention spans, disappearing journals — poetry remains the most perfect vehicle for sharing consciousness that humans have so far invented. This is true! The ancient Greeks thought so, anyway, especially about the lyric form, and I doubt we have advanced the argument very far since.

Some forms are better than others. The poet Zachariah Wells, for example, introducing his fine 2008 collection of ninety-nine sonnets by Canadian poets, Jailbreaks, remarked that the sonnet form — Shakespearean, Petrarchan, irregular — is ideal for the expression of “one coherent thought.” That is, there is statement of a theme, followed by proper dialectical elaboration of it, and then some telling couplet of resolution or aperçu. The collection’s title says it all: great sonnets are little renegade bursts of organized thought, poetic prisoners escaping their cages of silence. These are jailbreaks of the mind, offering a form of emancipation as “unselfing”: the verse shall set you free. Not free of routine shackles like social conformity or prejudice — the sins of small-mindedness — but the deeper ones of personal identity itself.

Great poems confirm a valid sense of being here just to the extent that they unsettle any typical way of conceiving an identity. They are antithetical to particularisms and ideologies. This is what I think Aidan sensed in her dark communion with Mary Oliver, begun in her suburban bedroom, the door to which was always closed, sporting its fierce warning signs forbidding entry. The freedom she sought was from the life she could not bear. The freedom she found was the courage to stay here anyway, cupped in the hands of language.

“I am a psychological and historical structure,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote more than a century ago. “Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style.” A style, yes. Or consider Samuel Beckett, in a 1961 interview: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Now and always, I want to add to this sentiment: that eternal notion of now.

Lyrics remind us that form is destiny in poetry, but they also recall the deep truth that voice is more important than message. We hear the call of the poet before we parse the words. And we know that these are words that — we must surely believe — cannot be arranged in any other manner. Poiesis, Heidegger would assert, is a bringing forth, a showing, a clearing of truth. The Greek word reminds us that all making is showing: creativity is its own argument and cannot be transcribed in other words without loss of its force. Thus can a graceful wide receiver offer us poetry in motion without saying a thing.

I realize this is an unpopular view at the moment. As the critic Stephen Marche has argued, we occupy a time where position matters more than voice. (Voice, he notes wryly, has its own vices, especially when it comes in the figure of any middle-aged mid‑list novelist one might care to name.) The difference can be seen, he suggests, in the chasm that separates Seamus Heaney from Rupi Kaur. I quoted Heaney already. Here is Kaur, from her celebrated 2014 debut collection, Milk and Honey:

Elsewhere in the book she writes, “do not look for healing / at the feet of those / who broke you” and “i didn’t leave because / i stopped loving you / i left because the longer / i stayed the less / i loved myself.”

Obviously tastes differ, but these lines feel to me like captions for selfies more than poems. But there is no arguing with success — or so we are often told. Kaur’s debut was a New York Times bestseller — the first of many. It has three-quarters of a million positive reviews on Goodreads and has been translated into forty-plus languages. Does such smooth translatability augur good work? Is it a proper sign of success, worthy of note? Well, if popular equals good, this is indeed very good poetry.

Except it really isn’t. Nobody can deny anyone else their claim to an elevated title if that title is a matter of taste. Kaur is a poet, sure, just as Madonna is an artist and Bob Dylan is a literary great. (He won the Nobel Prize in literature for “new poetic expressions,” whatever that means, so that title is inarguable in a different fashion.) Kaur is no poet, in the true sense, and I say that even without being overly precious about the descriptor. Like “artist,” “genius,” or “philosopher,” “poet” is a label whose application is always an act of value, not simply of fact.

You can judge me any way you like for saying it, but what Kaur offers the world, however sincerely intended and arranged in verse, is not poetry. There is no evidence of soul forging in those lines, no feeling of sprung metaphor or internal tension. The first-person “i” is somehow already fully present yet opaque, not quite real despite its lowercase show of casual access. So the language of its speaking becomes lifeless and flat — as it is no doubt intended to be, like text messages. More deeply, there is no feeling of a struggle to unbind the shackles of self, to reveal an inner mystery. The lines are already all self, all position, all posture.

The novelist Brandon Taylor, in his own best-selling work The Late Americans, from 2023, offers a tart scene of the quandary of poetry when it slaps up against today’s all-pervasive identity politics. His misfit male poet in a college writing workshop is called, as it happens, Seamus. At one point, Taylor’s free indirect musing goes like this:

Another of Taylor’s characters, Noah, also a writer, entertains a variation on these same heretical thoughts about the various aggrieved women in the workshop:

“These crude choreographies of the self” is an excellent phrase: it captures both the delicacy and the programmed quality of the moves that contemporary selves must make, the posturing that once was conceived as playful, variable, imaginative performance but that has become reduced to — what? A series of labels, boxes to tick, bins in which to deposit one another and ourselves. The moves are painted in shoe shapes on the floor of the world.

Speaking of such competition, it is worth noting that Taylor, a Black gay man, was criticized for his portrayal of women poets in this book. But I say again: verse that can aspire only to this kind of idpol boxing in and blocking out is no poetry at all. It is messaging, signalling — yes, cards played in a rather sick game of competitive oppression, pasteboard tokens laid down in triumphant fistfuls like tricks in gin rummy.

Philosophically speaking, the mistake operating here is easy to diagnose. There is a conceptual and practical dead end looming when identity is conceived by way of invidious traits — especially if those traits are, like race, combinations of factually small human differences and politically large social constructions.

Many of the contested traits are actually immutable and therefore, one might think, beyond controversy or even external judgment. Yet the traits are then clustered into identitarian groupings, creating by the same mechanism a disordered field of quarrelling tribes, all vying for victory in either direct competition or an endless insidious tug-of-war over a distant, notional more-aggrieved-than-thou status — a sort of oppression-off sweepstakes.

In this sort of struggle, we are bound to lose sight of Oliver’s primal vision, where we might instead “think of each life as a flower, as common / as a field daisy, and as singular, // and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, / tending, as all music does, toward silence, // and each body a lion of courage, and something / precious to the earth.”

The enduring error of most identity accounts lies in thinking of self as a projection outward, of desires and complaints, rather than as a perpetual mystery of unstructured but yearning inwardness.

This feeling of one’s inner life — not an inner self, exactly, since that would beg the question, but maybe some sort of inner shimmer, or the very idea of attention — is the truth that binds us one to another. The capacity for singular focus, a sort of centre of gravity within consciousness, mobile as the sum of vectors, is what defines us against the world. Yes — and it does so far more than reason, and thus, a fortiori, far more than politics.

Language is one way we seek to impose order on this disorder, to slow it down and give voice to it. Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Nicholson Baker, and Kev Lambert have tried to do this in detail, after their different fashions, but nowhere have they come as close to the efficient punch of just one Shakespeare sonnet.

Make no mistake: There is no self behind the language, just as there is no core identity underwriting the question of personal-political identity. There is only ever a framing device, a way of looking, a locus of attention. By “attention,” I mean much more than the transactional quality that is assumed in our recent so‑called attention economies. They should really be called distraction economies, with bogus attention running in both directions. The platforms and interfaces swap eyeballs for exposure: bogus attention is offered in return for the false promise of exposure or validation, with the data scraped for profit all the while. The new Police: “Every pic you take / Every post you make / I’ll be watching you.”

To give genuine attention is to heed; it is to attend, to be present, to show up. It embraces curiosity, focus, care, thoroughness, and expectation. Near the end of The Society of the Spectacle, his quirky treatise on the inescapable mass-mediatization of contemporary life, the Situationist thinker Guy Debord offered a kind of final life lesson. To cope with the demands and depredations of the spectacle, he wrote, we must cultivate the virtue or attitude of “savoir attendre.”

Knowing how to wait! Maybe learning how to wait? Or expecting, as a pregnant woman might be. Hoping, anticipating. I think of the active poised stillness of a baseball outfielder as the pitcher steps on the rubber, preparing to throw. The attention self is the unself: inwardness without specific definition or reification. It is precisely that part of every human’s ordinary experience that we look for, wondering whether it is present in even the most accomplished non‑human entities, animals or AIs alike. Is there something like it, to be them, beneath any specific behaviours or heuristics? If not, our potential communion is limited.

Such communion is by no means assured between even fully fledged members of the soulful tribe of the inward. That’s why art matters so much to us — or should, if we take ourselves seriously. That includes taking aesthetic judgments as seriously as any others, if not more so. This practice can be invidious, to be sure. “If you cannot discriminate between good and bad yourself,” muses the narrator of Randall Jarrell’s 1954 comic novel, Pictures from an Institution, “it cannot help seeming somewhat poor-spirited and arbitrary of other people to do so. Aesthetic discrimination is no pleasanter, seems no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination.”

Maybe the discomfort aroused by such judgment about making judgment is the reason why we see so much more position than voice of late. It seems so much easier to render our mundane social sentiments into what looks or sounds like verse than to “credit marvels,” as Heaney put it. The poetic bringing forth should offer “a surge of the soul rather than a servant of the ‘history’ or ‘society,’ ” according to him. But instead of crediting marvels, we prefer to celebrate worthy propositions, reducing poetry to slogans. Aesthetic discrimination is not allowed, since it too is reduced to a position, namely the one of white cisgender heteronormative privilege, an oppressive position made all the worse for being assumed rather than articulated, its asymmetrical power shrugged off.

I wonder. These days you would likely occasion only laughter in some circles were you to mention Cleanth Brooks’s 1947 essay collection, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, with its warnings against “the heresy of paraphrase,” or Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” from 1926, where a poem is enjoined to be wordless, mute, and palpable — not intending to mean but to be. Still, when I tell my own highly politicized students about what was once practised as New Criticism, they are thrilled with new curiosity.

I am also reminded of Ralph Ellison’s comments about André Malraux, anybody’s idea of a political writer:

In lesser writers, the particular calls to revolution die upon the page. If one considers tragedy as well, or indeed follows Ellison in being a disciple of art itself, then the lines of communication — soul to soul — may remain open.

Can a poem save your life? First, accept that that is not how and that neither of them is why. I wonder if my niece Aidan would ever have felt so moved about her own desires if she had read anything less than a superlative artist like Mary Oliver, whose work actively resists reduction. Is it such brilliance that has kept her among us, trying to find out why she’s here?

I used to believe in the old lefty slogan “Everything is political.” But then the people who said that became the actual politicians and no longer just “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” the way Percy Shelley saw it in his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry.” Now the anti-statists are the state, and there is almost too much politics to go around. Even if I sometimes feel I’m the last non-poet of my acquaintance who reads poetry, I also suspect I am not alone in wishing for more of it that speaks to us in the way of “The Waste Land” or “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” or “Lady Lazarus” or “The Mower against Gardens” or “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I mean poetry that is so obviously not about taking a position that it becomes, paradoxically, political in the most profound and transcendent way.

“Politics do not confirm who a person is,” the narrator of Rachel Kushner’s 2024 novel, Creation Lake, argues to herself. Funny, since this bit of first-person discourse happens in what anyone would consider a political novel. But, like Kushner’s even better work about terrorism, art, and multiple identities, The Flamethrowers, from 2013, Creation Lake uses politics to show the limits of the merely political — precisely by delimiting what the political self really is and so going beyond it.

The narrator should know whereof she speaks: she is a serial deceiver, a performer, a spook. “People might claim to believe in this or that,” she reflects, “but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized.” So what do they encounter, “in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people.”

The narrator is a spy for hire: a transactional turncoat. She has infiltrated a commune of potentially violent French anarchists, the Moulinards, who may be planning a half-baked protest against some European Union policy. The Moulinards, whose name seems intentionally to highlight their quixotic status, tilting at political windmills, seem to me reminiscent of the actual Invisible Committee, a shadowy group whose 2007 manifesto, The Coming Insurrection, is surely a model for the novel’s own fictional handbook, Zones of Incivility. Kushner’s notional tract — which someone should strive to compose — has the appropriately updated 2020s title: incivility, not insurrection, like microaggressions rather than oppression.

Through Creation Lake’s deft reflections, we encounter sly caricatures of real-life French politicians and a memorable takedown sketch of the nihilistic novelist Michel Houllebecq: he appears as a chain-smoking, creepy womanizer who manages to get himself on television all the time. It’s striking that, among many other assertions, The Coming Insurrection states that “it’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.” Indeed, “to no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection.” Debord’s vestigial optimism amid spectacle is, for revolutionaries both actual and fictional, rendered nonsensical.

But this is too hasty. There is the waiting for something to happen, the wish for action heard in Radiohead’s “The Bends,” and then there is the waiting for whatever will come. Perhaps the real insurrection is not a matter of obvious politics at all? The apparent hopelessness of events turns us inward, to the self that is always becoming. In times of deep fracture, we are all sent back to our four-in-the-morning selves. “The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and ‘beliefs,’ is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt.” That is the truth of the inward self: “This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.”

I know that everything I’ve said might be viewed as merely aesthetic evidence for an aesthetic view of things. But please do not reduce me to a position. Or, if you do, make it the position captured by the critic Audre Lorde in a brief, essential 1985 essay about art and politics called “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Poetry is not an extraneous thing but “a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

The quality of light, yes, but there is no illumination without darkness at its edges. Can poetry really light the way? It is not four in the morning as I write this, yet I want to believe — I want you to consider — that I am speaking with my best voice. A voice made of salt. It’s saying this: Like Lot’s wife, always look back with steady eyes at the wicked, glorious human city, even when angels tell you not to. The bus will take you there any day of the week.