THE POETICS OF WRONGNESS, AN UNAPOLOGIA

I’m writing this lecture in the middle of a particular night in my particular life. This is relevant. Three years ago I was asked to write these lectures by the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, and it seemed impossible. I’d never given lectures. I imagined that giving a lecture required me to tell other people what I think or what I know, which is not really my style. Or, perhaps giving lectures would require me to tell people what they should think, which is really not my style. What is my style, you wonder? I’m getting to that.

Stay with me, stay in the present, this moment, for a moment. I am, at this particular time in my particular life, the mother of three sons now 16, 14, and 8. This is relevant.

What you need to know about this experience is that I am always wrong. My body is wrong; my presence is wrong. The only thing more wrong is my absence. When I am present it is embarrassing. When I am absent, it is wounding. I have learned from my 14-year-old that I am always “not listening,” even when I think I am listening. I am “not helping,” even when I am trying to help. I “don’t get it,” even when I am trying to understand.

“Weren’t you ever embarrassed by your parents?” he asks when he doesn’t want me to meet him after the movie he is going to with his friends. Yes, I say. I was embarrassed by my mother every moment of every day and night when I was your age, I do not say. But it is news to me (unpleasant news) that I am now that mother, that embarrassing mother, although the fact that this is news is probably proof that I wasn’t listening, that I don’t get it, that everything about me is wrong.

My 16-year-old doesn’t find me personally embarrassing or flawed. From him I discover that I am, rather, universally flawed, mistaken, existentially unredeemable. My wrongness is part of the human condition; I am just one not very interesting specimen of general disappointment. With surprising patience, a raised eyebrow, and frequent deep sighing, he explains the many ways in which my ideas about gender, race, mathematics, science, economics, politics, history, psychology, and countless other topics are outdated, erroneous, and sometimes reprehensible.

My just-turned-eight-year-old vaulted from his toddler phase, in which everything anyone said or did was indisputably wrong if it conflicted with what he wanted, directly into his Woody Allen phase in which he daily confronts me with questions like: “Can you tell me one thing that matters after the world ends? Nothing? See? So nothing matters, right?” or “If everyone dies, then why does being a good person while you’re alive matter because eventually you’re going to die and everyone you ever help will also die?” There are no right answers to these questions, and this makes me both wrong and profoundly disappointing. Also, I am specifically wrong about everything having to do with soccer, football, music, the appropriate volume of music, the purpose of school (that there is a purpose), whether so-and-so is a nice person or not, what is funny and what is not funny, what is too rough or dangerous, and the matter of playing ball in the apartment. In other words: everything important.

Well, you might be thinking, “being a parent is like that.” But it’s not just my kids.

This is the summer—18 years into my marriage—that everything I say hurts my husband and everything he says hurts me. We misunderstand each other. Our words come out wrong or are taken wrong. Our tone is wrong even if the words don’t wound. If we stop talking we descend into a terrifying hopelessness.

Stay with me, this is relevant.

Two days ago it was gently revealed to me that the three lectures I’d spent seven months researching and writing are too long, about too many things, simultaneously unfounded and overly informational, too personal and too impersonal—basically: failures. Perhaps (with work) these drafts could become essays, but they are not lectures, said my editor.

So, to summarize: my math is wrong, my logic is wrong, my presence is wrong, my absence is wrong. My gender is wrong insofar as I come from a mode of thinking in which I believe that gender is a fixed trait rather than a fluid, social construct, infinitely complicated and slippery. Being male would make me more wrong but being female is also wrong and conflating gender with race or sexual preference is wrong. My heterosexuality and whiteness make me wrong, always and all the time, in the sense that they confer unto me privileges at great cost to others so that any “rightness” I have in the sense of power or agency is wrongly mine and part of what makes me wrong in the world and certainly part of what makes the world so very, very wrong.

At 43, I am too young and too old. Old people look at me wistfully, teenagers with disgust, children with distrust. Everything about me makes someone extremely angry—who does she think she is? Who do I think I am? And what does this have to do with poetry?

In this climate of wrongness it is difficult to say anything. This isn’t new, it is just more apparent to me than ever before. The volume of my wrongness is turned up so high it’s impossible to ignore and difficult to shout over. To say anything (even to say “I’m wrong”) is wrong—white people should listen. But, simultaneously, to be silent, meek, and/or apologetic is wrong—women should be strong and assertive. And speaking of “this climate”: I am one of everyone who is irreparably destroying the earth’s environment. I am more wrong than my children can even imagine.

What woke me up in the middle of this night was the realization that all this wrongness is both excruciating and exactly what I need to talk about.

Over the course of the past seven months, writing about photography, confessional poetry, and the ethical considerations of writing about real people, I was trying to build a case for my thinking and convince you that my ideas were right. I wanted you to feel that my ideas were interesting and worth your time. In this way I’d abandoned what made me a poet and the very nature of my poetics.

I first started writing poetry (and still write it) because the world, its people, and their ideas are wrong, insane, immoral, flawed, or unimaginably terrible. I write because I feel wrong, sad, crazy, disappointed, disappointing, and unimaginably terrible. I write to expose wrongness and to confess wrongness, yet I sense that doing so is futile at best and more likely compounds wrongness.

I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.

Here’s my current definition of a poet: “I am wrong and you are wrong and I’m willing to say it, therefore I am a poet.”

A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit. This is not the same as saying that I write poetry to “feel better” or to be forgiven or that the goal of poetry is to “right wrongs.” Perhaps some people feel better when they write poetry. Perhaps some poems make the world less wrong. What I’m trying to explain is that a poet’s athleticism lies in her ability to stay in and with wrongness. Of being willing to be disliked for being too smart or too stupid, too direct or incomprehensible, elitist or the lowest of the low, and for what? For the privilege of pointing out that everything in the world is wrong (including me).

Wrongness is intrinsic to poetry, which asserts with its most defining formal device—the line break—that the margins of prose are wrong, or—with its attention to diction—that the ways in which we’ve