VISION
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CULTURE * LIFESTYLE
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Mouth to Mouth Poets talking to poets about poetry. Our first column comes from Thadra Sheridan. She has been featured in Moxie and Rattle magazines, won writing awards from the Faulkner Society and the National League of American Pen Women and was featured in 2006 on the final episode of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She has been a member of four slam teams -- three from Minneapolis
and one from Here's another RealAudio clip of Thadra, from Minnesota Public Radio. |
 Published:
April 30, 2007 © Metaphor Media, LLCTo tell the truth or not -- that really isn't the question By THADRA SHERIDAN Plunked in my bathtub, preparing for tonight’s show, I start a new poem. The subject, as usual, is my ridiculous life – in this case, ex-boyfriends and the asinine things they do. One
shaved his armpits. Another changed into long, billowy skirts
when he came home from work. It occurs to me these gentlemen
might not appreciate the use of their real names, but I have
this glitch – I find it nearly impossible to lie in my
writing. I have writer friends who embellish with abandon, inflating their exploits to fantastical proportions for a laugh or a sucker punch. Tim O’Brien, in “The Things They Carried,” asserts it doesn’t matter whether the story he tells is true. I’m paraphrasing here – my mother is borrowing my copy of his book – but O’Brien argues true events are boring, that inventing details is, at times, necessary to make the reader absorb the full impact of his experience. Me? I bend over backwards to recount my experiences to the finest detail. I will stare at a wall for hours to remember exactly how long something took or exactly what I said at a given moment. I don’t expect this sort of feverish precision from my peers. The twisting of facts isn’t illegal. Inaccurate memoir won’t get you incarcerated. I’m guessing James Frey sold monumentally more copies of his book after Oprah yelled at him. I never read Frey’s book, but I did read “Sarah,” by J.T. Leroy, a completely fabricated HIV positive, ex-junky southern ex-prostitute teenage boy, who ostensibly wrote fiction based on personal experience. He turned out to be a mid-30s woman looking to get her work in bookstores and get gigs for her boyfriend’s band (they played at live readings of J.T.’s work – seriously, this was a sophisticated scam!). I don’t care whether these stories are true, but I find the mechanics of J.T.’s charade pretty kickass. And I rather liked the book. I mean, who else writes about truck stop whores? OK, so one can make a case for the disillusionment of all those readers who found comfort in the inspirational, “true” stories of Frey and Leroy. Well, Jesus! Does the discovery of their deceptions mean you’re not going to kick smack? If that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems. I’m a slam poet. I work in the grayest of artistic areas. Many argue slam isn’t real art. By nature, spoken word has very few filters or editors. Any schmuck can hop on a mic and blather to a crowd. This affords us a great deal of freedom in our craft (yeah, I said craft – I feel kind of dirty now). We can rap, sing, rhyme, dance, do a puppet show, if we so desire, and still call it spoken word. There’s no inherent structure, and no clear distinction between fact and fantasy. If 15 hookers and crackheads never leapt on the hood of your car and reached in the window for the keys – that actually happened to me – you just might have to make something up to tell a great story. I sometimes toe a very fuzzy line with truth, amalgamating several people, but under a microscope, none of it is technically untrue. The question here isn’t how truthful memoir needs to be, but what you want to accomplish with your writing. Do you want to get published? Sell a crapload of copies? Exorcise demons? Entertain? Appear on “Oprah?” Don’t let your audience boss you around. Decide what you’re writing for, believe in your work and stay true -- if only to yourself. |
2007 © Metaphor Media, LLC