Mary Karr on poetry

[radiantfracture]

Just putting this here so that I can come back and think about it later.

"Which is how poetry works. You start in a scared place and get ziplined somewhere truer. The real purpose of poetry, W.H. Auden said, is disenchantment. Not to throw fairy dust in somebody’s eyes; it’s stripping away what’s false so you can see what’s true underneath."

(Syracuse University commencement speech, 2015)

Comments

[sovay]

You start in a scared place and get ziplined somewhere truer.

I have to think about whether I agree with that line or not, but I really like it.

[radiantfracture]

I have a similar feeling about it.

Most obviously, I like the idea of this reward for moving into what feels most unstable -- fear, the emotion designed to make you want to avoid it -- being a landing in truth, or particularly "somewhere truer," where the secondary resonances of that "true" make the landing-place sounds like firm(er) ground. Stability from instability.

And that zipline too, sounds like such a guarantee, versus freefall. Of course the equation can't be as straightforward as this, but it makes moving towards fear (at least in the writing) feel exciting rather than, well. Fearful. Since I am also afraid of feeling afraid, and the consequences that follow it -- self-revelation, where that revelation is -- I'm looking for what that fearful feeling is -- shame?

And that makes me think of Joshua Whitehead and *Jonny Appleseed*, "humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed," though the zipline seems to promise something more breathtaking than humility (but I'd take humility).

[larryhammer]

That certainly fits with Auden's later attitudes.

[lokifan]

Oh, interesting.

[watervole]

Now, Flanders and Swann would have held the opposite view.
But I'm too bleary to look up the quote. In essence, they were a great comedy musical duo, well worth listening to even today.

[yarrowkat]

ooooh. i am going to think about this, thank you!