Is all poetry manipulation?

Is writing about whether poetry is manipulation also manipulation?

I think the short answer is, yes.

I wrote about a version of this idea here in a post titled “Traumadification.” In that piece, I say:

…I am grateful for the people who do the work of sculpting their pain for their audiences, even if those audiences are huge (and profitable). We never really know their motivations for doing so, maybe they don’t know them either. Art that I like most GIVES me something. It is a gift.

So even when people write about their traumas in compelling ways to me, I don’t mind.

Earlier in that piece, I write:

I have written about my traumas. Most of the time, no one sees those writings. Sometimes I share them with a small group of people in a workshop or a poetry reading.

However, I have shared or attempted to share poems about my actual traumas with audiences larger than just a small group. If Hollywood had called to make a film about the poem I wrote about the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me, it would have been hard to say no. It’s easy to be virtuous about selling out when no one is really asking you to.

I bring all of this up to say that I am currently struggling with the performance of self vs. the reality of self. Even in that brief passage I shared above about my writing intentions, it feels like I am obscuring some of the truth not to help my point, but to appear cool or smart.

When I wrote said poem about the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me, I voiced this concern to my therapist, that I was worried I was just using this bad experience to manipulate people and make them feel sorry for me. He said at the time that he thinks I can trust that the creation of that poem was coming from an honest place of love. But what if people DO think I am cool or smart or so tragically appealing after I share that piece? Should I crawl into everyone’s brains and tell them to stop it?

I remember when I first met Lynda Barry, my actual hero, in like 2006, I told her how much I loved her book One! Hundred! Demons! She got a sorta sad look on her face and then said, almost to herself, “Yeah, I made myself look pretty good in that book.” Which was totally unexpected considering how vulnerable and personal and unconventionally beautiful that book is. But now, I can see why she would say that (tho I reject that she needs to feel guilty about that, if she does). Even though she is upfront about that book being only based in part on her life’s events (she calls it “Autobifictionalography”), the main character is still someone named Lynda Barry and I fell in love with that character, despite the actual author telling her us to be wary of doing that.¹

And harnessing trauma is just one way a writer might manipulate their readers.

I have been thinking a lot about the phrase “part of me wanted to ____” when talking about why I made the choices I have in my life and writing. E.g.: “Part of me wanted you to give me a record deal when I was singing in the shower” or “part of me wanted to crawl back in bed instead of facing the wreckage of my soul.” To wit, I am having a hard time discerning whether that “part of me wanted to ____” isn’t the one actually driving the ship called the S.S. Robb’s True Intentions.

But I think Lynda Barry is a force of good (good manipulations?). And something like, say, this ad campaign from Dove is the bad kind:

When I briefly worked at an ad firm, people freaking LOVED that campaign. If my favorite art is a gift, my least favorite art just sits there doing nothing, or worse, like this ad (and all advertising) it is actually attempting to TAKE from you. Dove wants you to think they are sensitive AF and they see the real you and they want even total self-hating uggos like you to buy their dumb soap. Advertising is the opposite of art.

I am reading a book series with my 2nd-grade kiddo about a girl named Clementine with coded ADHD/OCD. They’re delightful books in the tradition of Ramona Quimby and it’s been a real joy reading them with my daughter and also using them as an opportunity to talk through stuff she might be going through. They are a gift.

One thing the Clementine character has begun doing when she is feeling ambivalent or overwhelmed or confused is to think about her feelings like an actual clementine orange - something like, “three of my clementine pieces were really happy that so-and-so said this, but the rest of my clementine was really worried about it.” It’s a super clever way to introduce/explain complex and conflicting feelings. And it helps me think about how much of me (in a poem, sure) might be coming from an honest place (celebration, connection, understanding) and how much of me is concerned with things that are more unseemly (loneliness, fragility, domination, validation, approval, seeming cool and pretty and tall, etc…).

I think that some people have a better relationship with their clementine pieces and can make these judgment calls far quicker than me. I also think a lot of people aren’t so concerned with whether they appear manipulative and desperate, for better and for worser. They just want you to buy their dumb soap or vote for them for president or whatever.

A lot of my current self-work is around not letting the pieces of my clementine that don’t reflect the person I want to be to call the shots². This can be hard when your good pieces feel outnumbered by the rotten ones.

Let’s bring this back to art.

Sometimes, when I am watching one of my favorite shows, I can tell when a joke or choice or episode or season slips through the writing process and it is not in line with the rules/conventions of the universe that the show has established (and that I had loved). Possibly this happens when the original showrunner steps down or gets fired, or maybe some executive’s child got to come “help” for a day. Whatever the reason, it feels like someone in charge doesn’t fully understand or care about the established rules that people have responded to. For example, take this fourth wall violation from Adventure Time:

That irritates me (this whole episode feels similarly cheap, despite its experimental style choice, which I am fine with). I feel similarly about moments in Futurama and Bob’s Burgers as well as post-season 10 Simpsons, season two of Twin Peaks and so on³. I have never noticed it in Steven Universe.

I bring all of this up, because when we are making choices (in writing, in living) we have to constantly assess whether those choices benefit or impede the health of our individual clementine, the tree it grows on, and the orchard it lives in.

So possibly all poetry/art is manipulative, but my real concern is what are those manipulations in service of? Are they gifts or are they numbing or are they distractions or are they sapping your very life force all in the service of dumb soap?⁴

1. I do not envy the artists who have to deal with the parasocial relationships of traumatized people. You have to walk a very fine line of honoring someone’s trauma and not allowing them to constantly trigger upsetting things about your own.

2. Also known as impulse control.

3. Not to mention the Star Wars prequels and postquels and almost everything except TESB, Rogue One, and Andor. But we are having a nice chat, so I won’t bring Star Wars into it.

4. I feel like a white guy poet saying all poetry is manipulation (even if it’s for “good”) is a very suspicious conclusion and should be scrutinized, by yourself and probably a professional therapist.