We’re All on This Nude Beach Together // Barrett Warner

This article is part of our guest curated month examining the theme "Writing about the Living," which poses the question: How can writers protect their own privacy and the privacy of others?

Holland Carter’s report of the new Andy Warhol retrospective at the Whitney, Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again, displayed The New York Times’ customary exuberance for its shinier denizens. It was a rediscovery! An exaltation! A transcendence! A sublimation! Carter enthused that the “350 works captured his mood of free-floating anxiety in extraordinary salon-style installations.” Lost amid these jaunty waves was the ocean itself. One obvious detail about Andy seemed to dwell in the corner of everywhere: he liked to paint those he knew personally, or else to paint only those he knew as an icon. There was no middle ground. His subjects were either bright stars or lonely pull chain lightbulbs, but no matter the incandescence, he let us know them, too. You can have your awe, he seemed to be saying, but it’s more important to be playful with whom and what you know. That’s the way of the visual artist, where it’s difficult to paint someone who’s imaginary. Picasso might have a thousand squares on his wet canvas, but somewhere in the studio someone sat in a loose robe with a glass of enervated Cava. And he knew that someone. For visual artists there is no anguish of knowing the muse. There aren’t any permission slips. In Andy’s case, his friends stood in a line that went out the door for the chance to have their identity borrowed for his art and mass produced in a midtown silk screen factory. Why should writing be any different? John’s Gospel is fairly straightforward: In the beginning was the word. He could have said, in the beginning was the paint brush. He could have said, in the beginning was the distant cousin of the chicken. Written language has always been a holy phenomenon, a sacred gift; and publishing, an act of faith. When the printing press was invented around 1450, the first publication was the Gutenberg Bible. Even the Declaration of Independence was never actually declared. It was written. To all of this holiness I say: please stop. As artists, we’ve known for a century that we must think of language as neither holy nor unholy. This is the basis of Postmodernism, which in turn led to personal writing, and then confessional writing, and this to zero-ism and the New Severity, and to Minimalism, and recently, to trauma writing which sort of combines everything into a subject-driven genre in which truth pivots away from seductive language. Going back to Andy, the answer to why he painted his friends is what defines art. Creating art or writing a poem involves a dream and a plan. To paraphrase poet Lucie Brock-Broido, there’s the dream of a poem—its haunt—and the plan of a poem—its house, or scaffolding. In practice, poets and painters tend to lean one way or another. By using his intimates as the plan of his work, Andy was free to focus on the dream of a painting. Writing about those we know, either with or against their wishes, is ekphrastic writing. But instead of a Grecian urn being the prompt, it’s a person. When I wrote poems about all of my friends in My Friend Ken Harvey, I didn’t do so to out them. I was outing myself through them and sharing a dream with them. It wasn’t my dream. It wasn’t their dream. It was the poem’s dream. We have to remember that each living person is a potential work of art, an “urn,” or at least a way of looking at and into the world. But I was used to writing about buddies and family and focusing on the subtlest of dramas rather than the glaring ones. And I come from a family of writers who feel the same. My wife writes poems about our daughter and memoirs about me. Our daughter writes plays about her mother. One brother has written a book about his faith (believe me, he left me out of it). My sister writes for various history journals—a genre in which is impossible not to include real people. And my brother-in-law has written a memoir, a Gay Melodrama in 13 Acts, “full of sex, drugs, and the drag queen with the 12-inch dick.” Even my father is trying to write a memoir of his life as a plumber. The first draft was only one page long. I spent two years with him to help him remember what I’d spent a lifetime trying to forget, and now he has 500 pages. I pray to God he never publishes Pipe Dream. But if he does, so be it, and maybe God will owe me one. All of this writing is allowed. What’s more, I encourage it. Strangers can be enticing, but not every best character is a stranger. Real or not, we have to be able to find a part of ourselves in them. The beauty of writing about those we know is that it’s so much more of a challenge to do so. We already know so much it’s nearly impossible to discover the new, which is why we write. Like with any writing, not everything which needs to be written needs to be published, but still, it must be written. And there is probably nothing I could possibly write about you or anyone else that Google and the government aren’t already hip to. Keats once famously said “Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced.” If language isn’t holy (and it most certainly isn’t), imagination is no more important than reality for a writer to be genuine. Writing about the sentient ones we know—the ones we love, the ones who hurt us, the ones we ache for in our dreams—that may not be how Wordsworth lit his fuse, but it’s how we do. It’s how we blow up the world.

Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco Press, 2016). His poems, stories, and stock car racing journalism have appeared in paper, newsprint, and online since 1982. Today he reviews books, writes essays, and lectures. Known for witty touches, his recent work can be found in Coda Quarterly, Adroit Journal, Consequence Magazine, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Entropy Magazine, and Cultural Weekly. In 2014 he received the Chris Toll Memorial Prize for his poetry chapbook My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius), the Salamander fiction prize for his story “Dimension,” and the Cloudbank poetry prize for his poem “Tanya, Tanya, Tanya.” In 2015, his essay “My Thousand Year Old Disease” was selected by Ray Gonzalez for the Tucson Festival of Books Rising Star award. Currently, he works as an editor for the Free State Review, a nonpartisan literary journal. He is also an acquisitions editor for Galileo Books, a 501-C publisher of poetry and prose collections. He lives in South Carolina, but surfaces in Brooklyn to breathe from time to time.