Even we were shocked by our own eyes in the dark
a contemplation of the poetic speaker inspired by Alan Michael Parker, two sonnets by Jess Smith, & a special announcement
After having a conversation with the cartoonist, poet, and fiction writer Alan Michael Parker for an interview series (In the Dark Room1), I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the poetic speaker. One of the first Big Lessons in reading poetry, something we’re taught in introductory creative writing classes and literature classes alike, is that the poet does not equal the speaker. The voice on the page does not represent the “actual” Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson, or Jess Smith, etc. We learn to use the word “speaker” instead of the word “poet,” and to be careful about whom we’re referring— the flesh and blood human who wrote/typed/printed/revised, or the alternative voice behind the words, the “persona” we hear/the person we picture as we’re reading the poems to ourselves.
I’ve always understood this divide to be a) assumed for fiction writers, b) necessary to articulate for poets and c) freeing. I’ve always thought of my speaker— let me continue to use that term for a minute— as Dickinson did. As a supposed person:
"When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person."
We tiptoe around this issue in our discussion of poems; we’re like parents leaving the baby’s room after she’s gone to sleep, eager not to evoke the ire of the poet/baby by assuming an image or a narrative detail was Real or Really Happened, etc. We want to protect the poet from the “supposed person,” so that the supposed person can go on saying what they really want to say.
But who is they? “When Whitman says myself… I mean, when the speaker says myself…”: We autocorrect. Walt contradicts not himself, but rather a supposed person— the representative of “Song of Myself, 51.” We would say that it is the representative of his verse that contains multitudes. At the same time: Wasn’t Whitman saying that he contained multitudes, too?
The reader and the poet “agree to meet where language exists,” says Parker, describing a “consensual universe” where the suspension of disbelief helps both parties to seek out connection via language, a connection both have a deep desire for.
How to we suspend our disbelief, our no ways, and why? I think, when I read poetry, I let go of the idea that truth is transmissible. Or: I am skeptical of reality because that skepticism helps in search of a bigger, more truer Truth. Not the truth of the received narrative (these things happened in this order to these people, etc, etc), but the truth of a lived experience, of how an imagination unfolds.
Lived experience: As Parker mentioned most readers are wont to do, I’m absolutely looking to understand the poet better. I’m absolutely on the hunt to find the human behind the representative, to hear the baby coo, or wail. Aren’t you? So, then, is talking about the “speaker” and the “poet” as two distinct entities a little— misleading, perhaps?
I am very, very intrigued by my donning awareness, here. And it is with this intrigue that I bring you two stunning poems by Jess Smith, published this week in Identity Theory. I guess that, for now, while I’m complicating my understanding of speaker/poet, I will call the voices taking me into the universe of these poems Smith and speaker, interchangeably.
In “Why Don’t We Paint the Town,” the speaker seems to dance from the audience of a classical theatre to the stage in her “tight little costume” and back again, eviscerating everyone’s participation in an unnamed farce. Whether the farce is love, or desire, or pretending to be polite while judging whoever is sitting next to you, she implicates the audience/reader in the drama right away. In the first line, she answers a question she must be able to read on their/our faces:
“I married an older man and why? I do not wish/ to be alone when they turn the lights on.”
At least two relationships are on stage in this drama from the start: the marriage of a woman to an older man, and the relationship of that marriage to the society the couple moves through. I can feel the members of the audience looking at the couple. And Smith wants to be looked at:
“I would like, right now, to have lips/ so red that even the cheap seats feel kissed.”
Do you feel kissed by that image? I do. Where is the reader sitting? Smith already has us thinking about a third relationship, doesn’t she? My relationship to that “high” society, and to my culture’s idea of the “younger woman.” When she ends the poem, an unrhymed sonnet, she punches straight through to the heart of all relationships, the dynamism of power/vulnerability, asking me to go back and consider that dynamic from multiple perspectives:
“I didn’t mind/ when you asked me what I was afraid of,/ what I was willing to do to feel safe.”
Damn, Jess Smith! In “The Standard,” Smith complicates a cinematic view of love, and we, the lookers/seers, are lined up with the romantic partner of Smith’s “you.” And we’re all up for analysis. As voyeurs in a hotel bathroom, we’re asked, alongside the speaker’s beloved,
“Aren’t you/ worried your camera will get wet, and ruined? Who will save/ these fatal moments if it does?”
The bathwater is black because the tub is black. How does anatomy, the fact of the body, or the miracle of sight affect how we see? What we see? Get in the way of the way we see ourselves? “Even we were shocked by our own eyes in the dark,” Smith writes.
And by the supposed person the poem captured, too? I want to ask.
I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a while, now!
In the Dark Room is an interdisciplinary series, featuring conversations that pair poets with scientists. In these casual chats, I ask thinkers that I admire to share their work with one another and to discuss their approaches to knowledge-building, imagination, and more. In the upcoming week, Identity Theory will publish the first installment: an incredible conversation I had with Dr. Deep Ganguli, a research scientist for Anthropic with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and Alan Michael Parker, whose description of the poem’s universe inspired this post (side note: how incredible is it to have a teacher go on teaching me fifteen years after I graduated from Davidson College?). Be on the lookout for that convo, and stay tuned for much, much more:
Thank you for reading. I hope something from this post has gotten your creative juices flowing. Let me, others, or your future self know:
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