Literary Truth Poetry Packet: dm June 2007
p 2-3 Literary Truth Writing Idea – Overview
p 4 Johan Balaban – After Our War
p 5 Yusef Komunyakaa – We Never Know
p 6 Thi My Nhung - A Vietnamese Bidding Farewell to the Remains of an American
p 7 Kevin Bowen – First Casualty
p 8 Yusef Komunyakaa – Facing It
p 9 Dunya Mikhail – What’s New
Literary Truth Writing Idea: dm June 2007
We will be watching films, reading stories and poetry as a means to examine how writers communicate deeply personal experiences to a reader.
At the heart of these accounts is a truth the writer needs to tell. The key concept of “literary truth” is that the actual event(s) that are the origins of the story or poem are not usually accurately retold in the writing. The poems and stories are what the writers see as the “emotional truth” of their experience, rather than reportage, a literal truth. This is what we want you to work on in your writing.
Take an experience or a time in your life and create a poem or story that is even more true than the “truth.” Write a distillation of the truth as you experienced it, and therefore “literary” truth.
We will talk about how one does this. But, for starters, we all do this whenever we tell a story and use a literary technique like metaphor or simile. When I describe my dad coming home late from his job as a mechanic as “He arrived home late, after the sun had punched out for the day, weary and beat like a boxer who had gone 15 rounds,” I am taking a literal event and heightening it with a literary technique. I am also consciously not mentioning all the times he came home filled with energy. In the end, my poem will be a distillation of my memories of my dad over time but connected to this one aspect of him (how hard he worked, etc). Thus, again, I am creating a “literary truth” of my dad vs. a “literal” retelling of a single event.
Literary Truth Example: dm June 2007
Example - Background from the Writer's Life:
When he was in second grade, he was allowed to walk to school by himself. The route took him through a place called Smith Pond, which was encircled by houses. At the edge of Smith Pond, there was a patch of woods with a path and a tiny stream that led to a little park. In the warm weather he would see rabbits, groundhogs, geese and ducks near the pond on his way to school. In fourth grade, the mom of a girl in his class died. He remembers being strangely affected by this event at the time, but only in retrospect did he realize the significance of this event. While looking back on the event he now realizes that this was his earliest memory of the fleeting nature of all that he thought was permanent in his life. If that girl's mom could die, then his mom could also die. If his mom died, then the world as he knew it would cease to exist.
Creating a Literary Truth Piece:
The writer's literary truth piece focuses on a boy in second grade, based loosely on him and is in part about the death of the mom of a friend. His real concern in the piece is how innocent and vulnerable people are at this age but also how exhilarating moments can be when the world is so new. The boy in the story will walk to school through a heightened version of the real Smith Pond. The writer will add an older boy who fills the boy's imagination up with stories of children who mysteriously disappeared into the woods on their way to school. What was simply a pond and a small patch of woods in the writer's life is now transformed into a creeping threat in the story about the boy. He places the house of the family with the sick mother along the route, near the woods, so that everyday the boy in the story walks by the house and imagines the mom inside. At the end of the piece, the writer creates a heightened incident using the rabbits from his childhood, which he now shapes for dramatic impact. The moment attempts to represent some truth about being this young, and how the mysteries of life can be revealed to us in surprising ways. The writer's story ends with this passage:
One morning on his way to school he came across a baby rabbit sitting in the grass at the edge of the park. He crept up to it very slowly, trying to get as close to it as possible. It was looking right at him. It didn't budge. Finally, he stopped one foot away and crouched down and looked into its eyes. He could see the sides of its body move as it breathed in the morning air. The world became very still. He tried to breath very slowly and quietly. He could not believe the rabbit hadn't bolted into the bushes. No one was on the street. No car passed. No other children were in sight. He reached out and touched the side of the animal's body. The rabbit quivered slightly, but did not move. In his mind he had just touched a small wild thing. He never told anyone about it. In his mind it was like a precious stone.
After Our War
John Balaban
After our war, the dismembered bits
- all those pierced eyes, ears slivers, jaw splinters,
gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes -
came squinting, wobbling, jabbering back.
The genitals, of course, were the most bizarre,
inching along roads like glowworms and slugs.
The living wanted them back but good as new.
The dead, of course, had no use for them.
And the ghosts, the tens of thousands of abandoned souls
who had appeared like swamp fog in the city streets,
on the evening altars, and on doorsills of cratered homes,
also had no use for the scraps and bits
because, in their opinion, they looked good without them.
Since all things naturally return to their source,
these snags and tatters arrived, with immigrant uncertainty,
in the United States. It was almost home.
So, now, one can sometimes see a friend or a famous man talking
with an extra pair of lips glued and yammering on his cheek,
and this is why handshakes are often unpleasant,
why it is better, sometimes, not to look another in the eye,
why, at your daughter's breast thickens a hard keloidal scar.
After the war, with such Cheshire cats grinning in our trees,
will the ancient tales still tell us new truths?
Will the myriad world surrender new metaphor?
After our war, how will love speak?
We Never Know
Yusef Komunyakaa
He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.
A Vietnamese Bidding Farewell to the Remains of an American
From the original Vietnamese poem by Tran Thi My Nhung, translated by Phan Thao
Chi and adapted by W. D. Ehrhart.]
Was your plane on fire, or did you die
of bullet wounds, or fall down exhausted?
Just so you died in the forest, alone.
Only the two of us, a woodcutter and his wife,
dug this grave for you, burned joss sticks,
prayed for you to rest in peace.
How could we know there’d be such a meeting,
you and I, once separated by an ocean,
by the color of our skin, by language?
But destiny bound our lives together.
And today, by destiny’s grace,
you are finally going home.
I believe your American sky
is as blue as the sky above this country
where you’ve rested twenty years.
Is it too late to love each other?
Between us now, the ocean seems so small.
How close are our two continents.
I wish a tranquil heaven for your soul,
gemmed with twinkling stars and shining moon.
May you rest forever in the soil of your home.
First Casualty
Kevin Bowen
They carried him slowly
down the hill.
One hand hung,
grey and freckled.
No one spoke but
stared straight up.
His body, heavy,
rolled back and forth
on the litter.
At LZ Sharon cooks spooned
the last hot food.
One by one the squad
walked back up hill.
"Don't mean nothing,"
someone said.
But all that winter
and into spring
I swear he followed us,
his soul, a surplice
trailing the jungle floor.
Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
What’s New?
Dunya Mikhail
Translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Ann Winslow
I saw a ghost pass in the mirror
Someone whispered something in my ear
I said a word, and left.
Graves scattered with the mandrake seeds.
A bleating sound entered the assembly.
Gardens remained hanging.
Straw was scattered with the words.
No fruit is left there.
Someone climbed on the shoulders of another
Someone descended to the netherworld.
Other things are happening
in secret
I don’t know what they are–
This is everything.
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