Say What's True

Robin Richardson thinks poets would do well being a little more unsympathetic in their work:

The unsympathetic writer is concerned, in a JFK sort of way, less with what the poem can do for her, and more with what she can do for the poem, and thus for the reader. The unsympathetic poet enters into the frightening territory of writing the truth of who she is and sees, regardless of the acceptable or admirable norms she’ll find approval in. When we enter into this realm of unsympathetic we sacrifice our desired self image in order to provide what very few do: truth. When we write without the censorship inherent in a ploy for likability we are free, admittedly frighteningly so, to show those things so few ever see, to add to the richness and diversity of the human experience. We promote empathy through exposure to those whose perspectives differ from our own while creating a haven in which those readers who resemble us find solace in the knowledge that they are not alone.

The unsympathetic writer offers Berryman’s terrifying comfort. She uses herself as a tool, pillaging personal experience, opinions, anxiety, obsession, and uncertainty. She knows that it’s not about her, that no one cares how well she looks. She knows that to reach the reader, the way she, as a reader would want to be reached, she must abandon her ego and say what’s true regardless of anticipated backlash.

(Illustration by Stefan Tosheff) 

Sunday Poem

HEART AS A BARGAINING CHIP: STORY OF A SMALL-TOWN GIRL 

Silly little lifespan only good for growing old. Record the facts,
she says: We swam the Thames. I am the only one to do it—girl
of thirty, flirting with the cabbie, say he looked like Goya, ate
me out beside the entrance of a Marks & Spencer, bobble−headed
Hawaiian eying from the dash. 

I was a teacher for a week—boys of thirteen diddling on while
I talked dirty about colonial history. Had enough? I grew up in a
weathered prom dress circa ’86, spent half a lifetime growing tits.
Sleeves are soaked in heart, sleeps are ever−wrapped in wanting
never to wake up. My sponsor is a monster.

Yoga course in Goa just to be; I had forgotten how to breathe.
These maps for hands, how many lines it takes to make my
psychic aunt insist I’ll live forever. Several thousand sleeps from
being human, chatting with a pint of amber. But I’m blond, I say.
Swear I’ll never suck that pint, that man again.

My gin is sleepy, says it needs to dance for money. I make big
boys buckle in the black light of a haunted hole, this blemished
stretch of Yonge Street. Fact: I am the kindest face to kick The
Canterbury Tales off your table. Don’t want to be your muse but
if I must, just know the record’s never real.

From Knife-Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis (ECW Press, 2013) by Robin Richardson

(Illustration by Caro To)

Can Twitter Make You A Better Poet?

Robin Richardson thinks so.

I was always meticulous about individual lines, but having to make them stand on their own made me think about their function on a whole new level. Every time I post a tweet I ask to myself “is this musically cohesive?” “Does it resonate content-wise without its context?” and most importantly, “Does it give the reader something more than what’s contained in its 140 characters?” This last consideration is what’s really improved how I approach writing. I don’t want these tweets to be clever little quips, or single thoughts that make a person sigh or chuckle. I want them to open infinitely off the edges of the page, or screen, so that each new tweet is the key to its own, much larger universe. Alice Munro is brilliant at this: in a single gesture or off-handed comment her characters inflate before the reader’s eyes, becoming fully realized within those few strokes. Poetry, if anything, should do the same in even fewer strokes.