Against Authenticity

        The Journey Home by Matthew Wong

Becoming a good poet is a process. It’s a learning process. It’s a developmental process. If you are the same poet today as you were ten years ago, you haven’t grown as a human being, let alone a poet. We of course learn from our experiences, but we also learn from reading poetry (or listening to music, or viewing paintings, etc., depending on your art). 

I’ve already talked about what I call the “cult of self-expression,” but here I want to talk about the related “cult of authenticity.” 

 

In the most recent Disney version of Pinocchio, Pinocchio decides he wants to remain a marionette rather than to become a real boy, as happened in the first Disney film. This is a significant change in the story. In the first version, Pinocchio is tested and tempted (by real temptations, like alcohol and tobacco, vs. the new version), and as a result he grows and develops. Part of that development is that he becomes a real boy. It’s a justified transformation, as he has earned it. However, in the newer version, Pinocchio decides to remain his “authentic self.” Meaning, he rejects growth and development and transformation. 

 

This, in the end, is what is meant by “authenticity.” To remain “authentic” means to reject learning anything because it endangers your authentic self. It rejects moral development just as much as artistic development. You have to develop your morals and your values. Yes, we have genetic proclivities to certain moral actions and values, but that doesn't mean we're stuck with them. 

This rejection of development is at the root of the authenticity cult and the self-expression cult. You don’t have to mature, change, learn, develop, etc., because all of those will get in the way of you being authentic and engaging in self-expression. But if you have children, you know you don’t really want them to be their “authentic selves.” You want them to become better selves.

 

Our aim should, rather, be excellence. Now, excellence isn’t perfection. Perfection isn’t an option. Excellence is continual improvement of your craft (or your moral self, or your learning, or any other aspect of yourself). 

 

Nobody wants to read poetry from your “authentic self.” Your authentic self isn’t all that interesting.   Nobody wants to listen to you play “authentic” guitar, uninfluenced by anyone. That would just be a mess, chaos, noise. And that’s really what your authentic self is. Rather, you need to develop style. Your style is developed by emulating others, finding those whose style impresses you, and transforming those styles into your own through combination. This is true of all the arts, and it’s true of poetry. 

 

Authentic talent always develops within a tradition. Your tradition is not likely to be the same as another’s tradition. Someone who loves Romantic poetry is going to write quite different poems than someone who loves the Modernists, like T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Eluard; and they will write different poems from someone who works within the postmodern tradition. As a Metamodernist poet, I work within not just these traditions, but am influenced by Japanese and Chinese poetry, Renaissance and Medieval and Ancient poetry, and various African and Latin American traditions. Obviously, then, my poetry will be different still. 

 

All of this is true of all the arts. My 10-year-old somehow understands this quite well. He is teaching himself guitar, and his musical influences are The Beatles, Nirvana, and Gorillaz. He also has tried to learn AC/DC, Queen, and Bob Dylan. He performed “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” for a school talent show. It will be interesting to see how these converse and converge to become his own style. In fact, he already plays around with creating his own compositions, and they are often quite upbeat. He will also, though, find other bands he wants to emulate, and they will provide further foundation for his style. Thus, it will evolve over time. His artistic self will develop over time, and that’s as it should be. 

 

This is what each of us should do as poets as well. I strongly encourage each and every one of you to become as broadly influenced as possible, across time and cultures. Poetry needs a renewal, and the way to do it is to embrace the entirety of the past, to embrace every tradition from the most ancient to postmodernism, and to create new things within that global frame. Each of us will find their own style, from a combination of our own personal experiences and the peculiarities of what you read, hear, and see. This is how you become part of the poetic tradition.

How a Poem is Produced

How does one write a poem? Or any work of literature, for that matter? Or, let us be less broad, still. How did I come to write this poem:

Shamanic Return

 

Where are the shamans that descend to bring

Up poetry from Hades—these new Huns

Cannot transform without the gift of art—

The world will desiccate in decadence.

 

A gold and emerald feathered serpent

To terrify us with its promises,

Convince us we must all at last repent

To gain his insights--shed, renew our souls.

 

One must descend in order to receive

The gift that will transform the pain and strife

We find ourselves in—we must now believe

In a new culture that believes in life. 

 

The shaman's poetry will heal the rift

That's poisoning our culture—that's his gift.

 
As you can see, in this poem, the form evolves from a blank verse quatrain to a ABAC rhyme scheme in the second, to a ABAB rhyme scheme in the third (yes, I’m ignoring the fact that I should be starting with the first end-word of the poem being A, but this is to make a broader point).The last six lines are thus structured as a Shakespearean sonnet, with the forst two quatrains showing an evolution toward that form, from blank verse to two rhymes, then the full four and the rhyming couplet. 

 

In other words, this poem is influenced by the form we call the Shakespearean sonnet. We call it this although the form was invented by Surrey. And Surrey modified Spencer, who modified the original Italian sonnet, which we call the Petrarchan sonnet, though it was actually invented by Giacomo di Lentini. So, the form of the sonnet I chose was due to the influence of Shakespeare on me, but we can see that there is a tradition of the sonnet as a form going back to di Lentini—and not just going back in time, but into another country, language, and culture.

Further, the Shakespearean sonnet is somewhat different from the other sonnet forms. While the Petrarchan sonnet's form creates a tension in the two quatrains that is released in the sextet, the Spencerian sonnet's form creates a tension between the emotional and the analytic,  and the Shakespearean sonnet's form creates a tension between thesis and antithesis that gets resolved in the couplet and is thus more analytical/intellectual. Form informs theme, and vice versa. Thus did the form of the Shakespearean sonnet suggest itself in the writing of the poem. In this case, there was an evolution in the poem from “chaos”—no rhyme—to increasing rhyming order. All of this reflects the theme of the poem itself. (Note: the topic chose the form; I did not, in any conscious way, choose the form before the topic.)

As I am sure with practically everyone else, I became exposed to the sonnets of Shakespeare—and any number of more recent sonneteers of more recent vintage—in high school and college. Even though I only started writing poems in the last of my undergraduate years, and although I only started writing formal verse on any sort of regular basis after meeting Frederick Turner while working on my Ph.D., I was certainly not unaware of the existence of sonnets, and there is little doubt that there was influence from those sonnets even before I wrote my first sonnet—or began writing them regularly.

Of course, all of the poems I have read over the years have helped to direct my general poetic tastes and tendencies—toward and away from particular styles, topics, etc. And not just poems. My interests have developed in fictional prose, epics, essays, nonfiction books, etc. My interests in social issues, in complexity, in economics and governance, in human nature, in neuroscience and psychology, in philosophy, etc. have all contributed to the content which appears in any number of my poems. One would have to trace the genealogies of each of those interests to me to understand the context in which I write.

And not just that. There are contexts not only of what I have read, but of my experiences and of my culture. My frustration at the degree to which the literary arts in general, and poetry in particular, are not considered to have much value in this culture, for example, is expressed in the poem. A recognition that there is a belief that poetry doesn't "do anything" by people in this culture—meaning, since they don't think it does anything, it doesn't and cannot do anything—is also there. 

 

If we take a look at another poem—this one a full Shakespearean sonnet, as it turns out—we will see that these concerns recur in my poetry:

On Censorship

 

Is poetry important? Yours is not

If no one wants to censor you or burn

Your manuscripts. If no one wants them hot

Off the presses and no one will spurn

Your verse, then it is unimportant. Death

Comes early to the dangerous who dare

To challenge worlds. Your long life and your breath

Condemn your frivolous words. We don't care.

But if you say the meaningful and break

The colored glasses that we wear, you'll see

Your words for their importance. When a lake

Of blood is spilled for words, then you'll agree

That arts' and humanities' import

Is such that only fools would dare abort.

 

Further, I suggest in this poem that there are obviously cultures that encourage people to think the arts do in fact do something. Why else would they have censorship laws? From this, there is a question of whether it is our long history of freedom of speech which has thoroughly defanged literature. (Which could further raise the question in a discussion of this poem of whether it’s worth losing poetry to gain freedom—which it would hard to argue against.)

In my poem, I essentially argue that our literature has become thoroughly defanged. Poetry is dominated by kitsch—it is primarily self-congratulatory in nature, demonstrating how wonderfully anti-racist, -sexist, -etc. one is to others who are very proud of their own PC credentials. It’s just preaching to the choir (yes, sometimes we in the choir do need to hear the message that we’re the chosen ones going to heaven and that our enemies are all hell-bound, but it's no way to get converts). There is nothing truly shocking or edgy—everything is only mock-shock. "Look, I have the word 'penis' in my poem!"—knowing looks all around. Blah-blah-blah-boring.

You know that today’s poetry isn't shocking because everyone who writes it is sitting around, as cool and comfortable as cucumbers in their plush offices, not in the least bit concerned that someone might read it who could threaten that comfort in the least.

If you write something that truly matters, you'll truly rile people up. But who is writing that poetry?

These are the thoughts—the contemporary thoughts, embedded in our contemporary American culture, in light of the fact that there are other cultures in which poets live truly dangerous lives—that underlie this poem. So, we not only need a cultural context, but a comparative culture context, a global context. We have to understand my interests and concerns. We have to understand my world view and understanding of human nature. We have to know my poetic genealogy. All of which I have, quite frankly, dealt with superficially here. To truly write about the context necessary for the poem in question to have been created, one would need to write a book. And one would have to not rely on me for the full meaning of each of these poems. 

And that gets us to the true complexity of a work of art like a poem. To understand a poem, you have to not only understand the person in question—at the time of the writing of the poem—but also the social context that helped to create that mind. That is, we have to understand the mind as extended beyond the emergent processes of the embodied brain in action. We have to understand all of the spontaneous orders involved, and the particular subnetworks within each that lead to the emergence of the poem from the poet. And we have to understand it not only in the social context in which it was written, but in the social context in which it’s presently being read, and based on the responses of numerous other readers across time and cultures. 

 

And this, too, is how one writes a poem. It is an emergent property of the poet’s influences, knowledge, wisdom, ignorance, foolishness, seriousness, world view, sense of humor, etc., combined with one’s skills in writing. Of course, the last thing you should be doing is thinking about any of these things as you write—other than, of course, writing skills, sounds, patterns, rhythms, and all the other things that contribute to the art of poetry.