"I Want People to Really See It": On Poetry, Truth, and the Particularities of Blackhorse Mitchell's "The Beauty of Navajoland"

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• "I Want People to Really See It":On Poetry, Truth, and the Particularities of Blackhorse Mitchell's "The Beauty of Navajoland"
• Anthony K. Webster (bio)

In memory of Blackhorse Mitchell

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever.

—J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country, 1983

Not just having been there, but having been then is what maketh the ethnographer.

—Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude, 2001

Poetry and Truth

The question of "poetry and truth" (the subtitle of Goethe's autobiography no less)—of which this paper is a small, particular contribution—has a long history in Western theorizing. What kinds of truths does poetry convey? The claims that follow are often categorical. Poetry, we are repeatedly told, tells us a certain kind of truth—reminiscent of Jakobson's (1960) poetic function, which foregrounds the form of the message over its other functions (including, of course, its referential function). To many a linguistic anthropologist, this formulation strikes a resonate note with Bauman's definition of verbal art as performance—"an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content" (Bauman 1975: 293). The truth is not of a referential or a factual matter, it is not something to be tested, but to be felt. [End Page 1]

Such discussions about the nature of truth in poetry are rather common—the literature on this, by poet and non-poet alike, is rather immense (see, for example, Samuels 2015; Makihara and Rodríguez 2022; see also Abrams 1953). In its vastness, perhaps, it suggests an uneasiness—perhaps akin to what Hazard Adams (2007) called "the offense of poetry"—about the very project of poetry in that Western tradition (one thinks, immediately, of Plato—for better or for worse). Be that as it may, such expansiveness allows as well for a bit of freedom in citing such comments. So here, partly because it is a chance to quote a favorite writer, and partly because she quotes John Cheever, let me quote Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook on the matter at hand:

Poems begin in experience, but poems are not in fact experience, not even an exact reportage of an experience. They are imaginative constructs, and they do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet's actual experience—they exist in order to be poems. John Cheever says somewhere in his journals, "I lie, in order to tell a more significant truth." The poem too is after a "more significant truth."

(Oliver 1994: 109–110)

I think Oliver captures well a particular view, a particular theory, about the relationship between poetry and truth. There is, or at least there should be, in Oliver's formulation, something timeless about the truth of a poem (Oliver 1994: 110). Oliver goes on to write:

I like to say that I write a poem for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. … It reminds me, forcefully, that everything necessary must be on the page. I must make a complete poem—a river-swimming poem, a mountain-climbing poem. Not my poem, if it's well done, but a deeply breathing, bounding, self-sufficient poem.

(Oliver 1994: 110, emphasis in original)

In this view, a poem seems to exist outside of time, it is "self-sufficient" and carries all it needs within itself.

Coming at it from a slightly different perspective, one that I have a particular sympathy for, Charles Williams seems to suggest that the truth that poetry reveals is that all language mediates with the world—that prose deceives us into thinking that language is an unmediated description of the world, but that poetry, through its very poetic form, reminds us that language always mediates with the world: [End Page 2]

[Poetry] avoids the last illusion of prose, which so gently sometimes and at others so passionately pretends that things are thus and thus. In poetry they are also thus and thus, but because the arrangement of the lines, the pattern within the whole, will have it so. … Exquisitely...