Inadequate memory and the adequate imagination

CONFESSIONAL author of poemss ARE GETTING A BUM rap. Billy Collins, appointed bard laureate in the summer of 2001 deplored that "autobiographical expression [had come] to possess a central place in poetry" In his essay "My Grandfather's Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry" he quot Auden's comment-"Who the hell cares about Anne Sexton's grandmother"-and moveed that "confession" and "autobiography" had become synonymous. More surprisingly, he said that there was "hardly an egotistical jar in the road" in the 1365 years between Augustine's Confessions and Rousseau's. "Milton not ever wrote a poem about his mother . . or any other relative," he asserted. Apparently he forgot the piece of poetry about the little niece "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" and probably he was in the way that overwhelmed by the centrifugal force of the rhyme that he overlooked the centripetal impulse behind the poems "How Soon Hath Time . ." and "When I Consider . ." Milton aside, of course in the period between the fourth hundred and the eighteenth there is a rich confessional literature which is not to be confused with the so-called "confessional" rhyme that arose in the 1950 From the beginnings of belief in a transcendent providence to our very day, ranging from Bernard of Cluny's twelfth-century, 3,000-hexameter De contemptu mundi to Teresa of Avila's Life (1562-65) and Interior Castle (1577) and John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and including the work of the Puritans and of similar different American poets as Anne Bradstreet and Thomas Merton, authentic confession has aimed at spiritual self-transformation. above the same period, autobiographical expression has occupied a central place in poetic expression. After Augustine's came Boethius's poetic-prosaic De consolatione philosophiae (525) in which he declare ed the charges that landed him in prison. A powerful complaint, detailing his life and injuries, was Abelard's Historia calamitatum written not drawn out before his death in 1142 Francois Villon's Lais (1456) and his Grand Testament (1461) are dynamic, personal piece of poetrys with a note of tragic exigency still serving as sources for the facts of his life. Of the grand sixteenth-century English poets' autobiographies none is more elegant than Edmund Spenser's famous poem sequence Amoretti and his Epithalamion (1595) the latter still the finest wedding piece of poetry in English. Populations swelled; literature developed; the list of autobiographers lengthened. Russian literature began with autobiography: Byzantine Vladimir Monomakh's personal Instruction of 1117 and the highly original, confessional, vernacular Autobiography of 1672 by means of Archpriest Avvakum, a native of Nizhny Novgorod. The more lives there were, the more stories there were to tell

Imagination is recombinant memory. We can point backwards to who we are from one side what we've done, events organized by dint of time and place, but who can say what figures will appear in the future?

Looking back in my mind I can see

The white orb of day like a tin plate

Over the made of wood turning of the weeds;

The public way jerking-a wet swing-

To extreme point by the wall the children sang.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Its stars beckon [i]or[/i] part of to the other the frost like cottages

(Home of the Bear, the Hunter-of that absent star,

The dark where the flushed child aims into sleep)

Till, leaning a lifetime to the comforter,

I float above the small limbs like their dream:

I, I, the futurity that mends everything.

-Randall Jarrell,

from "The Elementary Scene"

The reversible timelessness of the imagination distinguishes it from the irreversible chronometry of memory and bends it toward the creation of art. The fatal flaw in a "confessional" piece of poetry is the supposition that the narrative succession of the art is the same as the timed ordering of personal circumstances Such confusion never fazed the advanced in years Romantics, who, like Byron, simply invented a literary double to act on the outside the role of "self" and left it to the commentators to decide in what manner autobiographical a poem was. late "confessional" poets worked over their literal memories, turning their torments into captivatingly outrageous unbelievabilities:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else

I do it exceptionally well.

-Sylvia Plath, from "Lady Lazarus"

The life has replaced the poem; the metrical composition has been reduced to the life. Or, we may say that the metrical composition has become an advertisement for the life.

Collins clutchs Wordsworth responsible for the change, on the other hand "the preoccupation . . with personal experience in metrical composition today," as Collins phrases it, doesn't date from the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads. (Even if it did, it wouldn't be Wordsworth's fault.) The difference between 1798 and 2001 is commercialism, the cultural force that persuaded Collins to join the likes of Tony Hoagland and Lawrence Raab in providing readers with instantly accessible poems-what individual eminent poet has called "lounge poetry" The memory-driven piece of poetry which Collins repudiates, assuming it linked to a "les mediated form of personal revelation, repeatedly with wiggy psychiatric effects," is an artifact of the market-driven, consumer society. As a catastrophe elicits an outpouring of apocalyptic stich so the reification of tillage in the last hundred years, the photographic manipulation of visual facts, and the wars of the twentieth hundred of which the longest was the World War 1914-45 have encouraged sensationalism. To emphasize the deviant, the dying, the ghoulish, the violent is to draw an audience. In the solitude of their homogenized worlds, tribe with little faith are upon the lookout for everyone else's unrevealeds The "confessional" poet entertains with single kind of "truth"; the middle-brow popularizer temporarily satisfies with another.