This is one of my favorite arguments for the importance of poetry as told through fiction:
"I spend a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I'd really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, 'I guess so.'
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?"
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say. 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you are curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together."
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep." (The Bell Jar, pg. 62.)
I have to admit, I'm a little embarrassed about posting something like this all openly on Facebook because it's all angsty, but I definitely did go through my angsty phase a little recently.
I'm still going through it maybe, or maybe just more of an angry teen-ager sort of phase. There must be a sort of angry teen-ager in there right now, still processing what the fuck has just happened to me, what the fuck, I have just gone through. I have been experiencing a lot of anger recently.
Anyway, I wonder how my friend will react to the snippets I sent her. I hope she will not think I'm crazy, or if she really does think that, that she'll be able to see how I'm working with it.
The reason I read the Bell Jar is because I wanted to understand sadness and depression a little bit better, and because I wanted to see how you write a roman-a-clef, and also how you write from the perspective of the crazy voices in your head.
I guess i am still searching for a voice for this memoir-novel, roman-a-clef, and I need some encouragement from other writers, living or dead, that it can be done and that drawing from real life and experiences is not inherently boring.
I think after going through an MFA program in fiction, which I admit, may not have been the smartest thing to do, you start to come out with that sort of impression, as Phillip Lopate says, that your life is far too boring for anyone to ever get interested in it, and in fact, if you let yourself get just a little too interested in it, that you may as well just become a big fat narcissist and get it over with.
I think those charges are unfair. I don;t think being interested in telling a story that is based on your own experiences is necessarily narcissistic. And besides, fiction writers, if you are so unwilling to judge any one else, why are you so quick to judge those of us who draw from personal experience as somehow inferior or less imaginative, or at worst, self-indulgent writers.
There is this string in the fiction-world of veiled do-gooderism that you should only be interested in the experience of others, "get out of your own head." Well, if Dostoevsky had followed that advice, would he have ever produced "the underground man"? No! For those of us who have a hard time "getting out of our head," maybe the answer isn't isn't to get out of it at all, but to quit being so damn embarrassed about it, and listening to those voices that will try to chastise you for it, and to just dive in.
For us, it is those crazy voices that everybody else always just tries to escape that are the very source of our fiction or maybe even our roman-a-clefs, if we are ever going to truly write anything.
That at least, is the way it is for me, and there is a long tradition of it, even if it is not all that glamourous, and there are plenty of horrible tragedies and unsavory behavior in all of it, which I won't get into right now, but some of you may know what I'm talking about.
I am perfectly willing to join the club of the crazies, and to join hands with the crazy voices in my head. That is ultimately what works for me. That is what makes my work just a little less "boring."
