On Anger & Lying
I am super delighted to be joined today by poet Cynthia Marie Hoffman, whose new book of prose poetry Exploding Head came out last month. I asked her if she would be interested to chat about poems and anger and luckily for all of us, she agreed! She also agreed to share a pic of her extremely handsome cat:
AR: I'm very interested right now in how poets write about anger. Do you have a favorite angry poem by another poet? What moves you about it?
CMH: I immediately thought of “Virgil, Hey” by Camille Guthrie, but now that I’m looking at it again, maybe it’s not really an angry poem. There is anger in it, but it’s not the primary emotion being explored. But the fact that I thought first of Guthrie’s poem, and not another (like Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” for example) is probably evidence of my complicated relationship with anger.
When I think of anger, I think less about the emotion being felt than the thing that emotion is directed at. You’re usually angry at someone, even if it is yourself, or about something. When I’m depressed, I don’t say “I’m sad at myself.” Sadness sits inside my body. But anger shoots out like an arrow toward its target.
In “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath uses the word “you” 23 times, often using both end-rhymes and internal rhymes to create an incantatory repetition of the “you” sound. Listen to a recording of Plath reading this poem. I’ll never forget the first time I heard her voice reciting that final line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” The target of her anger is clear.
Whereas Plath’s poem calls out “O You,” Guthrie’s poem begins, “Ah me!” It’s an expression of lamentation, not anger. But there is anger simmering in this poem, too, and there is a target. And the target is, surprisingly, her children.
The first time I encountered this poem, oh, how I was so delighted by it! Guthrie is certainly not the first female-identifying mother poet to bemoan the less enjoyable moments of parenting (and I should note that Guthrie has said these are not factual replicas of her own real-life children), but this poem became sort of a permission text for me (like, literally, my first reaction upon reading it was to squeal, “we can do that?”), laying a path for me to write about the hard or disappointing moments in my own middle-age life as the parent of a teen.
The most challenging thing about expressing anger in my own poems is naming the target. I find it hard to risk accusations, such as “X person did X thing to me.” In fact, I find it hard to name others in my poems without anything but love or beauty (if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all, right?). And especially, as mothers, we are expected to only write our children (or imagined versions of our children) in a positive light. There’s a stigma associated with lamenting parenthood.
But Guthrie dives right in with both lament and accusation. “Take a look at my firstborn son/” she says, “Who declaims his device sucks; Stabs holes in his bedroom wall.” The speaker would prefer to descend to the “second circle of hell” … “Rather than drive these two to school this morning/ And suffer forever with the other mothers.”
Ugh. That ending gets me every time. “Virgil, Hey” is definitely one of my favorite contemporary poems. It’s gutsy in the same way Plath’s poem is gutsy, but it’s also cunningly transgressive.
AR: Do you have a favorite angry poem of your own?
CMH: As hard as it is for me to express anger toward others, I seem to have no problem expressing anger toward—and lamenting disappointment—in myself. I’ve been shooting arrows at myself my whole life.
My newest collection, Exploding Head, is a memoir in prose poems about my lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It is primarily concerned with my interior experience, and the couple of poems that I’d say approach anger are directed at myself. One is an expression of anger, and the other is about giving myself permission to express anger.
The original draft of my poem “Float” was originally twice as long (or longer). (The “you” in this poem is me.) But Jesse Lee Kercheval, with whom I’ve been in various poetry groups over the years, suggested that I remove most of the artsy, poetic language that consumed most of the page, and just let the angry parts sit there raw. That was a big risk for me. I often feel like I’m hiding an emotion inside a poem, like I’m shy about the emotional parts, and no one will really see my anger or frustration or disappointment (or self-loathing) if it’s wrapped in a nice gift bag with a curlicue ribbon. You know what I mean? In the way that the recipient of a gift is suddenly looking down at all the confetti that just spilled into her lap, and she won’t notice the dead rat in her hand she’s just pulled from the gift bag.
What I learned from “Float,” and from keeping it in the book even though I still feel uncomfortable with it, and what I think Jesse Lee was trying to give me permission to do, was to let the anger be the main event.
In the other poem, “It’s Okay,” I’m giving myself permission to feel angry toward others and to express that anger. And I’m also angry with myself for not having expressed anger in the past. I want to rewrite my own history. I tell my childhood myself that she should have acted differently; she should have stuck up for herself: “You should have stomped on your sister’s hand.”
And there’s also, in this poem, that sort of misdirected anger wherein you self-sacrifice in order to “show” others how much they’ve hurt you. A “you’ll regret it when I’m gone” kind of a sentiment. But overall, this poem is about telling yourself that it’s okay to feel feelings without judgment, and to express those feelings to others. In my late 40s, I still have to remind myself that this is true.
AR: Writing about anger can be very tricky. Do you have any tools you have found useful, either at the desk or away from it, for accessing that place of anger and then being able to communicate it? What feels most difficult when you try to write about anger?
CMH: I’ve been trying to acknowledge anger more in my current work, especially around the difficult subject of disappointment in family life. I think I tend to fall more into Guthrie’s “Ah me!” camp than Plath’s “O You,” but I’m experimenting with bravery.
Something that keeps me from expressing anger fully in my poems is the question of publication. Are angry poems what I want to put into the world? Perhaps there are many things more worthy of being angry about than those things I’m angry about within the small domestic space of my poems, anger that could spur social change (and there is certainly a lot of fodder for rightful anger right now in terms of climate, politics, human rights). But because my poems tend to focus on close human interactions, there can be a real personal price to pay by naming friends and family in published work. Most of the time, I would still rather write about my loved ones only when I’ve got something nice to say.
But the best advice I can pass on to others is to go ahead and write the poems you want to write. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll want them published. You can think about that later. Self-censorship is rarely healthy for the creative spirit while you’re in the act of creating.
AR: Do you have a favorite practice for tending your anger, either on or off the page?
CMH: I tend to get frustrated more than anything else (and I think frustration is a kind of anger), and I try so hard not to take it out on the thing I’m frustrated with (which is often something like the printer but more often it’s because I’m angry with myself for doing something last-minute). Stepping away is not my forte.
Having a child put things in perspective. I used to get so desperately upset when I’d break or spill something. Those were my moments of thinking I’d rather descend to the second circle of hell than to be on my hands and knees toweling milk off the kitchen floor. But as soon as I had a tiny human in my care, who would look to me for cues about what was worth spending our precious energy on, I stopped caring about messes, or the fact that I made those kinds of mistakes. I still hate the printer, but I’m getting better at not hyper-fixating on frustration.
I’m also working on expanding my ideas about what can go into a poem. Not just emotions I’m not well-practiced at expressing (such as anger!) but also, certain people and things. Another thing that delighted me about Camille Guthrie’s poem is that it says things like, “his device sucks,” and there’s an ATV in the poem! I would never put an ATV in a poem (but why not?).
Other favorite poets of mine who are fantastic at putting popular culture things (i.e., the very things that make our daily lives) into poems are Erika Meitner and Nick Lantz. Setting poems in the convenience store parking lot and putting current events and politics in your poem allows for the expression of different kinds of emotions that we might not be able to access in poems that are stripped bare of popular culture references in an attempt to be “timeless.” We’re not living a timeless existence. We’re alive today. And today, there’s a lot to be angry about.
Huge thanks to Cynthia Marie Hoffman (and her cat!) for joining us.
Writing news—if you’re in the CT River Valley, my Writing the Body class at Looky Here in Greenfield starts the first Monday in April and there are a few spots still open. There is no writing without our bodies, yet we often forget this and/or struggle to bring the body onto the page. All experiences welcome, and prose/poetry/hybrid/beyond. We will read examples from writers including Audre Lorde, Leila Chatti, Melissa Febos, Aurielle Marie, Sarah Vap & more, spend time together writing, and have time to share as desired. More info and sign up here.
My essay, “So, I Lied—the Chapbook as a Coherent Container” is now up at Write or Die Magazine. This essay was really difficult to write—some pieces of it I wrote over the last four years, but it was also incredibly satisfying to finally be able to express and share.
I shared a sneak peek with you last week, but here’s another lil slice:
As I pulled the poems together, there were too many stories, tangled together. There was the lover, the ex-husband, the new lover I had now. There was the surgery and then the abortion. I didn't want the chapbook to start with a flow chart, a cast of characters. I had tried to explain myself to my lover so many times and it had never worked. I refused to repeat my pleading explanations here.
So, I lied. I told the truth.
Phillip Brady, in that same essay, said, “the overall effect is to present an imaginatively coherent world.” The more I worked on these poems together, the more I understood about creating that coherent world. Explaining both a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and an abortion was too much in 25 pages. I made them into one loss, one grief, one splintering. It wasn’t true to the facts, but it was still true.
When I had written about that year in fiction and non-fiction, I had gotten stuck each time on trying to tell it right. Trying to explain all of it. As I was writing this essay, I happened to be in a poetry class taught by Dorianne Laux. Our last day together, she said to the class, “The lower case ‘t’ truth is the truth of our life. The upper case ‘T’ is the Truth you want to write.”
I chose with Rupture, and here again, to give up on telling the truth, lower case t. I could never tell it just right. I would settle for telling what I could, which has turned out to be more.
I’ll be teaching an online class with Write or Die this summer, Speaking Up & Talking Back: Troubling the Archive.
Erasures, blackouts, centos, & more offer us opportunities to change the archive, add to the archive, and alter the archive. What's been left out or mis-represented? What still needs to be heard and seen?
In this course, we will look at examples of how different writers have troubled the archive, from the Ferguson Report to ideas about illness to perceptions of the Deaf (& more!). We will learn several different techniques for working with the archive in our own work, and have some writing time together.
Yours in love and rage,
Adrie