Literary journalism loves lists, and lists are (usefully for
literary journalism) always controversial. Robert
McCrum's 100 best non-fiction books in The Guardian will be no exception,
I'm sure, but what immediately puzzles me about the enterprise is the inclusion
of a handful of poetry titles.
Anyone who, like me, spends a good deal of their time
browsing second-hand bookshops will know that the classification of poetry can
sometimes pose problems. Really, the best solution is to have a section marked
'Poetry' and leave it at that. However, poetry titles do sometimes get lumped
in with the 'Non-Fiction' section and even (oh, horror!) with the other books
on a shelf marked 'Literature' (I think 'literature' is being used here in the
sense of 'to be read out of a sense of duty, not for pleasure').
I can just about understand McCrum's inclusion of Hughes's Birthday
Letters or Plath's Ariel, given that they are on some level
autobiographical works. I was recently re-reading Plath's poems in the Collected
volume edited by Hughes and was struck by the way that Plath re-cycles experience almost immediately into poetry; she goes into hospital and writes
hospital poems, then she starts bee-keeping and writes about a visit to a
meeting of the local bee-keepers' association, etc. So far, it could be
argued, so 'non-fiction'.
 |
| 'Reading' by James McNeill Whistler (Metropolitan Museum) |
The case seems less clear for Eliot's The Waste Land
or Edward Lear's nonsense verse, however, which also make it onto the list. McCrum
offers the justification that, whereas the novel is easily defined, non-fiction
includes just about everything else. I'm not really convinced by this, but
there is a more important point here about the perception of poetry and the
limitations that critics and readers impose upon it if they understand poetry
as belonging to that over-arching category of 'non-fiction'.
This perception is common with many people who are starting
to write and share their own poetry. When I work with writers new to the form,
suggestions for changes are often resisted with the insistence that 'it really
happened like that!' My (perhaps rather heartless) response is normally 'I
don't care!' What matters is what works for the poem, not what really happened. This practical aspect of writing poetry tells us something
about what poetry is trying to be.
In the 1970s, the critic Phillipe Lejeune
proposed the notion of the 'autobiographical pact' as a way of distinguishing
autobiographical writing from other kinds. Lejeune argued that autobiography
was characterised by a conventional understanding between author and reader,
namely that what the reader was being presented with was an account of a real
life, which had been lived by the person whose name was on the cover of the
book.
To extend Lejeune's notion of such a pact between author and
reader, I would argue that non-fiction operates with a different implied
understanding. Non-fiction books are those which, however artfully, want to say
something about the reality of the world, or to reveal some aspect of how that world is in fact. They are asking the reader to share in an interpretation of the social or natural world as it can be found outside of the text.
This is not, to my mind, what poetry does. To adopt and
somewhat adapt a notion from Niklas Luhmann, I would argue that what poetry
does is to announce to the reader that it is not the world. The poem claims its
own space, apart from the world, and leaves the question of its relationship to
the reality of the poet's own experience, and that of the reader, open.
In other words, the poem is an aesthetic object that challenges
the reader to make sense of the it in relation to their own experience. How
they make that sense, and how the encounter with the poem might enrich their
understanding of the world, is deeply personal. In this respect,
reading a poem is an act of creative imagination.
To return to the example of Plath, the poet might easily
have written a memoir detailing a spell in hospital, living with small children
and a difficult husband, her experience of depression, and so on. Instead, she
wrote poetry, which is not simply 'non-fiction' because the material she worked
with was her own experience. Her work may get pigeon-holed as 'confessional',
but it is the transformation of life into poetry, not into reportage.
Why does this matter? It has been observed often enough that
the 'I' of lyric poetry tends to make us think of the poems as confessions, that is to say as
accounts of personal experience, and therefore as somehow 'real'.
I remember being at a reading by the brilliant Jonathan
Edwards when an audience member expressed shock that many of the poems that
Jonathan had written about things that had happened to his family were, in
fact, completely invented. Jonathan's straightforward response was that he was
writing poetry.
Without putting words into Jonathan's mouth, what I think he
meant by that was that he wanted to write something that would move people and
that would open up their own thinking about what the experience of family might
mean to them. The poems were not there to tell them what family is, but for them
to find out what it means for themselves.
When we reduce poetry to 'non-fiction', then, we miss
something fundamental about what reading poetry could be as an experience for
readers, leaving us with an impoverished understanding of this art form. Let's
hope The Guardian now does the decent thing and creates a list of the
best 100 poetry titles. I have plenty of suggestions.
