All My Poems are Fiction, Fabrications // Timothy Liu

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?

The words that happen on the page often reference things that have happened in the life I happen to be living, but in the end, they remain just that: words. Meanwhile, the life that I happen to be living instantly becomes the life that I’ve lived, with or without the intervention of language. Language is always too late, it seems. (Or too early!) That doesn’t mean others won’t take delight or offense at the words I write, especially if they see themselves in the fictions that I create.My husband, for example. When he reads the many poems I’ve written over the decades called “The Marriage,” he feels implicated even if the marriage that I’m writing about is not the one that we share. In fact, the marriage I’m often writing about doesn’t even exist until it appears on the page, a marriage that doesn’t require a blood test or a visit to the county clerk. When I write a poem called “My Mother, My Whore,” it’s a dance that takes place among four words carefully chosen and arranged. Nor would it now offend my mother who died of cancer over two decades ago. But if she were alive?As is happens, that was just the case when my first book, Vox Angelica, was published in 1992. I did not send it to her, not right away. The second section of the book’s three sections centred on my relationship with my mother, particularly its history of sexual abuse. It was one thing for me to get the words down on the page, to move them around, to curate, to stage a dramatic scene, enact some sort of catharsis I’d hoped would expiate or even redeem our fraught entanglement. Hundreds of hours of therapy, of the talking cure, preceded and proceeded the making of that first book. Did I have the right to write about my own mother, never consulting or seeking her permission, let alone approval? Of course you know the answer. But did I have the right to publish the thing, to go public with something so private while she was still alive?The poet James Merrill wanted to wait on publishing his memoir, A Different Person, until after his mother’s death, but his maternal centenarian managed to outlive him, and JM, being afflicted with AIDS, decided to publish the thing within two years of his own death. So much for waiting.I do not want my mother peering over my shoulder when I’m in the heat of writing my poems, whether she appears as a character in them or not. Nor do I want my husband doing the same. Or any friend, enemy, acquaintance, person; not unless I invite them in, show them the words on the page when I deem them presentable. If we set aside the legality of writing something libel, there remains the issue of broken confidences, tawdry revelations, even humiliations whether they are based in fact or fiction depending on whose point of view. If we are careful with our words, we know that even a word spoken in the heat of the moment cannot be taken back, cannot be unheard, erased. Consequences naturally follow, some irrevocable and unforgiven. I think this must be doubly true for what we publish, the paper trail that we leave behind.Ted Hughes burned the last two journals that Sylvia Plath kept in the last months of her life, that great flood period when she wrote some of the poems she is most remembered for, posthumously collected in her now classic volume, Ariel. Hughes did not want his surviving children reading the contents of those journals after their mother’s suicide. His decision was extreme and irreversible. Some would say downright selfish. Immoral.As it happens, I sent my paranoid-schizophrenic mother a copy of my book two years after its publication. I was ready to face the music. And as it turns out, one day she did call me on the phone with perplexity in her voice: “This book that you sent me confuses me. You say it’s poetry, but it’s not.” When I asked her to say more, she said, “It’s doesn’t sound like Keats or Wordsworth.” (My mother had been an undergraduate English major before getting her Masters in Library Science at SUNY Geneseo.) So I explained, “Mom, Wordsworth and Keats wrote in the last century! Poetry sounds different today!” Following a long silence, my mother simply said, “Then your book is poetry.” We never spoke about it again.Let It Ride. I’d just returned from Ireland and decided to conclude the book with two poems that I’d written there (with no one looking over my shoulder, no one to police my peccadilloes). Even now, I have some concerns over what others might think about the fictions I’ve created, especially those closest to my heart, those who are not shy to ask, “How much of this poem is real?” Would they think less of me if I fessed up, gave them access to more fabricated confessions I’ve held back from the poems themselves? I’m reminded of the Confucian adage, “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” Some disclosures bring us closer, others can create more distance, even alienate. Will the living affections of those whom I love most “bend with the remover/ to remove?” Because I can never escape the fact that I’m an animal filled with delight and disgust over what I delight in, and when it comes to fastening words to a page, I irrevocably take part in that Faustian pact to make time stop.

The son of Chinese immigrants, poet Timothy Liu was born in San Jose, California, and earned a BA at Brigham Young University and an MA at the University of Houston. Liu’s poetry collections include Luminous Debris, Kingdom Come: A Fantasia, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse, For Dust Thou Art, Hard Evidence, Publishers Weekly Book of the Year Of Thee I Sing, and Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award winner Vox Angelica. Liu collaborated with artist Greg Drasler on Polytheogamy. He is the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He has taught at William Paterson University and Bennington College’s Graduate Writing Seminars, and currently lives in New York City.