5 - Black and white and Re(a)d All Over: The Poetics of Embarrassment

Summary

And another thing, the implied reader mutters as I begin: no more ditsy stories like how your father would phone each time he read one of your first person poems to ask, ‘But when did this happen?’ For heaven’s sake don’t be anecdotal – it’s so mainstream. Deploy the appropriate academic register if you want to be taken at all seriously. Invoke strategies of resistance or ethnogeographies or synergy and don’t mention dads, telephones or what happened. It’s just embarrassing.

But the scene of writing – and associated activities like teaching, giving readings, workshops, negotiating the critical–creative interface – already seems prickly with a rash of latent embarrassments. Whatever the style, subject or affiliations, writing, perhaps poetry in particular, is an overdetermined and risky attempt at public utterance that eventually boils back to the performance of some kind of author-self; and who in this position really wants to be seen as self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, deluded, merely anecdotal or wilfully obscure or taken personally for the ‘personality’ of their poems? And this is before considering the many intimate mortifications afforded by reviewers and blogs. Isn’t this what happens? Yet this is a subject given only the most cursory attention in critical-creative literature, and indeed in contemporary writing per se. It is not fashionable to admit embarrassment. It would be, well, embarrassing.

The present essay attempts to stare this issue down, partly insofar as it has become a conscious feature of my own poetry, especially in a series of poems that draw on the attitudes and concerns of the first-century BC Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, whose work both dispenses and courts embarrassment in ways that seem brazenly to cross some otherwise difficult temporal and cultural divides. But it also considers how, as a singular affective distress requiring the presence of an audience or other (unlike shame, for example, which may be felt for an act known only to oneself), and typically arising from social or professional rather than moral infractions, embarrassment may offer valuable leverage for thinking about the critical–creative dialogue: itself a potentially awkward and unscripted exchange that, to borrow an exemplum, can feel like hosting a dinner between your Puritan uncle and an old college friend who gets obscenely drunk and throws up in the fireplace.