I’m writing a collection which, in my head, has the strapline ‘an autobiography of lies’. My plan is to write a number of poems that either focus on lies I’ve told and have been told, and what I think of as public lies: historical frauds, deceptions, crimes, political spin, and more. The first real seed for this was coming across a line of Joseph Brodsky’s out of context — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’.[1] I wondered about this, and started to think about how lies might not only be shameful, but might indicate a level of self-awareness or self-assertion, awareness of authority, calculation, a mixture of rational thinking and, of course, imagination. In reaction to Brodsky’s line, and before I’d read his full essay, I wrote ‘Porky’ about my own first lies (due out in Landfall 243), and then came across another intriguing quotation: ‘Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone’ (Elizabeth Bowen). That was fascinating, too: to think of the ways lies might whittle us some privacy, help to protect a treasured interiority.
I’m working on a poem based on the Bowen phrase; but of course not all lies are healing or defensive fictions. They can also be an outright abuse of power. I’ve found that sometimes the most obvious or sizeable historical deceptions or cover-ups don’t necessarily fuel me with the urgency and focus I need to shape language in a way that leads to a poem. Other deceptions feel as if they need multiple poems. ‘Androphobia’ grows from one of these. It’s a fictionalised version of a number of institutional abuse cases I’ve read about both in New Zealand and from overseas.
I think the reason this particular social dereliction did lead to a poem is that as the mother of sons, I’ve seen close up that male children can be as vulnerable as girls, something I understood intellectually but not at a visceral level until I watched the way schools blunt and suppress as much as they foster and grow. While I hasten to say that the child in the poem is imagined, his situation isn’t. The technical challenge in the poem was how to get the sonic effects and line breaks to resonate but also be understated enough that a certain tension in the narrative is sustained, not distracted by what Heaney calls ‘the hedonism and pure jubilation of purely lyrical creation’ (Finders Keepers, Selected Prose).
notes
[1] In his essay ‘Less than One’ (1979) Brodsky is writing about the first time he hid his Jewish identity.