Yours, Truly
Humanities
Creative Writing
In an essay titled "Against Sincerity," Louise Glück makes an important distinction (to a poet, at least) between actuality, truth, and honesty. Actuality refers to "the event." It pays notice to chronology. It attempts objectivity, taking down facts like a court reporter.
Truth, she claims, refers to the "illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art." Truth is a funeral procession. The face of a stoic mourner beside a belligerent one, the rear of the black hearse and the ribbon of cars that follow—these images, relayed through the lens of an intent speaker, can tell us more about the life of the deceased than an obituary can. Truth is both subjective science and lifetime pursuist, and oftentimes an ellaboration. For art’s sake.
This phenomena is differentiated from the last of the three categories—honesty. Honesty or sincerity refers to the act of "telling the truth," or relaying the actuality of the event, which Glück notes is not necessarily the path to illumination.
When we can not remember, we create. My poetry explores the gaps between memory and imagination, the conflation of myth and personal history. Where is this tripwire between honesty and imagination—behind which trauma, which tiny joy? Behind these poems, I do not shy away from the questions: Have I been honest? Why not?
The poet loses jurisdiction the moment language takes hold of vision, and again when the reader assigns those words meaning. For that reason, the poems in this collection are not to be read biographically. While they do come into contact with the actual, they are aware of the fact that they can never be the event in themselves, that the vantage point of the speaker is inherently limited. Nevertheless, in writing these poems, I have come to know myself in new and shocking ways.
As much as I plead for distance, the work in this collection attempts relatability, almost to a fault. These poems were written during my junior and senior year at UCSC. They cycle around the same institutions that I have cycled around—family, school and faith; my relationships with sex, death, and dysphoria. They are in dialogue with poets past and contemporary, especially with the talented group that I have been privileged to workshop with at UCSC. I hope that you enjoy reading these poems. Once read, they no longer belong to me—so let them be yours, truly.
