expanded, not shrunk

A year before my long vigil in the hospital began, like most other poets I know, I'd been knocked over by Sharon Olds's poems, particularly the ones about her father. Why had I never written about mine, I wondered. What was I afraid of? I admired Olds's openness, the way she seemed to strip her skin raw in the telling, her amazing strength and bravery. As a poet I longed to be that truthful, that strong.

Last April, I heard her read in Toronto. She stood at the podium, and before each poem, took a deep breath as if she were about to dive under, squared her shoulders and presented her words to the audience. The poems swept over us like a shock wave - they were sexual and aggressive, brutally honest, metaphorically brilliant. Sitting in the dark in the audience, I felt small and insignificant in the face of this onslaught of talent. Yet something began to irk me - perhaps it was that very feeling of smallness. In hearing Galway Kinnell, or Anne Szumigalski, or Adrienne Rich, I have expanded, not shrunk. I have felt excited, and whatever my place in this poetic world, so glad to be a part of it. After their readings, I've wanted to go home and write poetry. After hers, I wanted to stop.

Most of what she read was new, but as in her previous work, the strongest poems that night were about her father. I began to feel that her blunt, painful honesty was a kind of excess. The poems seemed obsessive, almost salacious, in a way I hadn't noticed until I heard her read. For me, it was as if a certain element of poetry, its egocentricity, got magnified, thrown on a big screen, and I did not like what I saw. I did not like the way she had used her father to make a poem. I did not like what I might do to mine for the sake of the poem. I did not like the arrogant, self-absorbed, amorality of the poem. It made me small. 

 - Lorna Crozier, from her "Notes on Writing" essay for Event Magazine (Spring 1991), as collected in 50 Years of Event Magazine: Collected Notes on Writing.