In my parents’ library was a collection of Emily Dickinson poems. As a child of ten I came across the book and kept it by my bed. Each night for a few weeks I memorized a poem selected at random. I chose these in no order, and not particularly for their meaning. I simply loved the sounds, the rhymes and the rhythms. Around then I decided I was going to be a poet.
By 12 I was a Dickinson acolyte. I felt I had a personal relationship with her. I was going to be a poet, I knew she’d been secretive about this ambition, and so was I. At about this same time, I remember being in our living room and hearing, from the radio in the next room, an English voice reciting the Death of Kings speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II. I was completely mesmerized by the interwoven sounds and images. It was so extremely beautiful, tending to sheer music. Syntax, imagery, repetitions, vowel music, all the Shakespearean lyrical miracles were working, in a speech ending with Death himself making an entrance. Much later, as an adult, I realized that I’d been drawn to the Shakespeare speech for its mesmerizing lyric beauty, but also for its subject, death. My father was absent for much of my very early life, away in the navy. My grandfather had been a second father to me, and at five I had been alone with him when he died suddenly. As was typical of my family, this was never referred to then or afterwards. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” — indirection is a hallmark of Dickinson’s work, and indirection was my family’s language and my language.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
The poem begins with “Truth” in the first line and introduces “lies” in the second line. “Lies” in this line means position, not untruth, but that other meaning of “lies” makes itself felt because of its proximity to the word “truth”. The way a poem must tell the truth is compared to the way the fact of lightning must be presented to children – “eased / With explanation kind”. The speaker is the kindly circuitous truthteller, and the readers are children who might be cruelly frightened if the truth about lightning were baldly presented. But the speaker is also one of the children. She and we, the readers, are enrolled together by the use of the word “our” in the phrase “our infirm Delight,” both of us too weak to directly confront “the Truth’s superb surprise”.
Contradictory meanings co-exist in the poem, another form of slant truth-telling. “Truth must dazzle gradually” is a seeming impossibility, since to be dazzled means to be immediately struck. Further, “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind”. People may be blinded by never seeing truth, or blinded by a too-abrupt, too direct encounter with that truth.
Truth, like a flash of lightning, is a “superb” source of surprise and delight and also potentially injurious, even lethal. Like lightning eased for children, poetry should be constructed to make something otherwise unbearable to the writer and the reader into something pleasing. The poem sets forth this project, and simultaneously illustrates its accomplishment in the poem. What I want to do in my work, and what many of the poems I love do, is to make dark or painful things pleasing – pleasing to me, and I hope to a reader — by drawing on multiple resources of language and technique.
Poetic influences are often absorbed unconsciously. Early on, from reading poets like Dickinson and Shakespeare, I internalized iambic rhythm. It took me years to root it out of my writing. That rhythm would creep in just when I wanted speech rhythms, or jagged or harsh sounds. I eventually learned how to make these competing elements jostle each other in expressive ways. An ongoing effort for me is to become aware of what I’ve internalized, so I can make conscious choices about what to use.
I consider myself fortunate that my earliest experience with poetry took place at home, not in school. There was no one to tell me what I should like, or what anything meant, or to interfere with my immediate physical pleasure in what I heard. I loved many poems before I had a clue as to what they meant. By the time I encountered poetry in college and then graduate school, I was fully inoculated against the kind of analysis that leads a reader far away from the actual experience of poems.
Patricia Carlin has published three books of poetry including, most recently, Second Nature. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she was awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught poetry and poetry writing, as well as Shakespeare studies, at Princeton, Vassar and The New School. She co-edits the poetry journal Barrow Street.