The Hazards of Biography

I found this one recently, and I think it illustrates something both profound and dangerous in poetry. 

Mock Rescue, Lifeguard Training

Scott Ferry

When you sink
to the bottom, bubbles
flash up to the surface
like lives lifting,
breaking. You have to pretend
you are unconscious,
that you are close to the glory.
Quiet, body below you, you
lift above the pool, the planet.


Except you know your co-worker
is coming, swimming down,
trained to breathe you back
into your body. Hands
grasp you across the chest,
and pull on the buoy's line.


You are in the life-
guard's arms, breaking
through. She tilts your head
back, and you breathe,
non-committal, eyes still
weight-
less.


She asks you
out-of-breath questions
as she sidestrokes you to safety.


You want to ask her
if she is a midwife
or a Saint with Calypso's grip.


To which side of the river
are you taking me?


Why is it so urgent
that I come back?




I'll start with the dangerous. I don't know whether or not this describes a real experience. (And generally, I feel a poet's biography should be off-limits: they gave you a poem, don't ask for their life story too.) But it certainly has that ring of truth, the sense that he has experienced this, had a sudden opening in his perception that said, "This is something real, something big, and there's a poem here." I could go either way - it doesn't ultimately matter whether he underwent this or not.


This is hazardous because it blurs the line between creation and description, between life and art. It's exhilarating, moving, immanent. But especially for beginning poets or beginning readers of poetry, there's a real minefield here.


Take biopics of artists. Doesn't matter which, really. It could be as grandiose and excellent as "The Agony and the Ecstasy" or "Amadeus." It could be as trivial and misleading as "Walk the Line" or "The Hours." But nearly every one shows something in somebody's life which leads directly (and I mean DIRECTLY) to producing a piece of great art we all know and love. (I exclude the mind-blowingly amazing Dylan mytholo-pic "I'm Not There" which seems to bypass this fallacy entirely.)


It doesn't work that way unless you're Proust. And not even Proust was Proust. As much as he'd like to forego living in favor of chronicling his life even he couldn't keep it going the whole way. So creativity, imagination, outright lies are the way art gets created, not by journalistically inscribing the meticulous details of your biography. Nobody's that interesting, and I mean nobody.


That's the danger - reading this kind of thing makes it look so easy, like all you have to do is transcribe what happened and bingo! there's art. Especially beginning poets or people who have little exposure to art with a capital A fall into this trap, though apparently it includes screenwriters and directors, too.


But the profound part is this: everything is fair game. Stupid demonstration exercises for a lifeguard course can make for really important, surreal, deep poetry. You don't have to have BIG IDEAS or THE NEXT BIG THING to make great verse. It's important to remember that when you're reading poetry, only the poem is fair game. But when you're writing poetry, EVERYTHING is fair game. The big things, the little things, your childhood, stupid games you used to play, exercises for work, daydream fantasies, fictional worlds, things that never happened but you wished they did... It's all legitimate.


And it's important to remember that anything you have, are, remember, imagine, create, recreate, transcribe, inscribe or lie about is all fertile grounds for art. It makes me happy because we create these things out of everything we are, not only out of the literal day to day events we experience. 


Life is not art, and art is not life. That's a good thing, because we can use the one for the other, and the other for the one. It's part of the rules of the game, the big game, the best game - making sense out of our lives by reading and writing, creating and recreating ourselves and one another.