Poetry Is A Kind Of Lying
Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.
Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.
Degas said he didn't paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.
Notes
Every poem begins with a small betrayal of reality. In Poetry Is a Kind of Lying, Jack Gilbert confronts the strange dishonesty at the heart of artistic creation. Experience must be rearranged, diminished, or exaggerated before it can become language. What reaches the reader is never life itself, but something made from its remains. Perhaps truth has never been as simple as correspondence with what happened. Language transforms whatever it touches, and even our most sincere confessions depend upon what we choose to leave out. The lie becomes inseparable from the possibility of revelation. This November, as we explore The Mask, Gilbert brings us closer to a troubling thought. We are all, in some sense, authors of our own appearances. The stories we tell about ourselves acquire a reality of their own, until the distinction between the person and the story begins to dissolve. Perhaps the mask reveals something precisely because it was made. #JackGilbert #AmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #PhilosophyOfArt #PoetryAndTruth