He isn't a man of my fiction; 'Herb' is a poem based on family fact

October 25, 2006 11:39 pm

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By Mary Claire Mahaney
Fourth of a 6-part series

When you sign up for a fiction workshop, fiction is what you expect to write. But when you enroll in a poetry class, should you expect to write poems that are fictional, poems that are factual, or poems that mix fiction and fact?
I put the question to my teacher and classmates in Advanced Poetry (www.writersonlineworkshops.com): do they take liberties with the facts when recounting a story in verse? Do they tweak the facts in order to get at a (larger) truth? Do they make up details to make their poems more compelling?
The response: they write to describe the world around them, sometimes from their own perspectives and sometimes from another’s point of view, and they write of things that have happened and of things they imagine happening. In other words, they blend fact and fiction.
My own experience of writing verse has been an either-or proposition. Some poems I write solely from fact, wanting to leave a record of what happened, exploring associations between events, finding a challenge in sticking with the facts. I’ve written many poems about my family, in which I’ve made up nothing. The poems I’ve been submitting for class critique fall into this category.
In other poems, I’ve wanted to tell a story from my imagination. I wrote a two-hundred-line poem in rhyming couplets about what happens in a painting class the day a model comes to pose. The story is fictitious; the poem, I hope, gets at a truth beyond facts. My working definition for truth and fact in literature, if not in a court of law: facts are the events, as they occurred; truth is the meaning one takes from the facts.
For a poem to “work,” for it to move the reader to thought, to emotion, to action, the poet must own the idea on which the poem is based. If the poem is a call to arms, the poem won’t work if the poet herself doesn’t believe in taking up arms (unless the writer is using irony, where subtext is more important than the text itself). If the poet is not convinced of her message, the reader won’t be, for there is no touching a reader from behind a screen. It’s safe to bet that if a poem is convincing, its creator holds the beliefs she espouses in the work.
It doesn’t follow, however, that the details of a convincing poem are factual. A poet can reach her readers, even though the narrative is fantastic, if she asks us to consider themes that cross boundaries of time and place, like the role of fate in our lives or whether ties of blood are stronger than ties of friendship. Well-known fictions told in verse include Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. More recent examples are Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (a novel in 690 rhyming sonnets) and Brad Leithauser’s Darlington’s Fall.
In How Does a Poem Mean? John Ciardi and Miller Williams tell us, “Every poem…by its choice of tone and attitude is a mask the poet assumes.” In one mask the poet may present himself as heroic, in another flighty, in another wistful, the authors say. Writers reveal themselves in different ways. Some poets choose “speakers” for their poems who couldn’t possibly be themselves, or even anyone. In Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” it’s obvious the poet is writing fiction.
Even after the poet has begun to write, she might not know the mask she’ll wear. A writer may begin a poem with the facts in mind, intending to recount them in verse, but during the writing journey she finds herself entering another world. One of my classmates said even if her poems start out with events as they actually occurred, she may tweak the facts to write a better poem. Establishing the purpose for a poem, to record an event or to describe nature, for example, may be something the poet does before putting words on paper, or it may occur in the writing process itself. Discerning her purpose in writing helps the poet find the mask she’ll wear.
In “Are we related?” (published in a previous Herald column), I mention eating German food, my wish. As I wrote in my essay, when we cousins met, we went out to eat, but it was at Cracker Barrel, not at the German restaurant of my fantasies. What I wrote in my poem was factual: I, the speaker, fantasize about going to a German restaurant, the restaurant adding to the pleasure of dinner with my cousins, a connection to our shared heritage. The poem held my dream.
For week four I posted this poem in my online class:


Herb

You didn’t look like a Herb.
That’s why I called you Jeff
when we dated.

What does a Herb look like?
A Herb is a big-bellied man
wearing suspenders and a homburg
and driving a ’47 Ford pick-up.
In ’72 you wore jeans and poor
boy shirts and sneakers
and drove a gold Tempest.
I called you Craig.
I thought you’d drop me.
You were eighteen and tall
and handsome with silky dark
hair and hazel eyes. (How
about that time I told you
what pretty blue eyes you had?
Was I thinking of Jeff, who didn’t
exist, or Craig, also a specter?)

And you called me Mary.
I kept telling you that
wasn’t my name. You even
have an aunt named Mary Fran
but you didn’t double my name.
I had to straighten you out
on that one.

No, you didn’t look like a Herb,
but the truth is I’d never met
a Herb before I met you. Now
you are my Herb and
you look the same as you did
when I called you Jeff:
tall and handsome
and hazel-eyed, but your hair
is prettier now,
a little silver behind your ears.


Taking my cue from classmates’ comments, I first addressed how the speaker felt when Herb didn’t get her name right. (In the poem, I am the speaker; it is an autobiographical, factual poem.) I added the lines, “I wanted you/to know me” as well as a line from an earlier draft I’d taken out for the posting—“I am more than Mary.” There is some humor in these lines, for Herb may well have felt similarly misunderstood when I called him by another name.
I tightened up the syntax by removing conjunctions and articles. I deleted the line about being “dropped” and the passage about Herb’s young-man looks, relying on the end of the poem for a description of him. I dithered over keeping or jettisoning the bit about eye color. I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing—I removed it to enhance the flow of the poem.
Finally, I removed “the truth is” from the second line of the last stanza because I questioned whether I could have had such a preconception about a man named Herb without ever having met one.


Herb

You didn’t look like a Herb.
That’s why I called you Jeff
when we dated.

What does a Herb look like?
A Herb is a big-bellied man
wearing suspenders and homburg,
driving a ’47 Ford pick-up.
In ’72 you wore jeans and poor
boy shirts and sneakers
and drove a gold Tempest.
I called you Craig.

And you called me Mary.
I kept telling you that
wasn’t my name. You even
have an aunt named Mary Fran
but you didn’t double my name.
I had to straighten you out.
I wanted you
to know me.

No, you didn’t look like a Herb,
but I’d never met a Herb
before I met you. Now
you are my Herb and
I am more than Mary.
You look the same as you did
when I called you Jeff:
tall and handsome and hazel-eyed,
your hair even prettier now,
a little silver
behind your ears.

Mary Claire Mahaney is completing her first novel, “Osaka Heat.” She lives in McLean, Virginia, and can be reached at marycmahaney@msn.com You can visit her website at www.maryclairemahaney.com

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