Sondra Perl
Sondra Perl’s essay accomplishes a lot in a small space and perhaps that is the takeaway from this essay of secret telling and revelation. Through pairing away all extraneous words and ideas her poetry allows her to come to the nub of what is she is trying to say. It is as if through clearing away the extra words, the idea itself is revealed to her as a writer. As a writer’s tool, it seems to me to be a method that both serves to enhance style, but also in terms discovery. It revels to the writer what is grasped for at the heart of feeling. It is a self revelatory process.
As a technique it works in other ways too. Perl uses poetry to come to her ideas, which also means that moving from line to line there is a connective flow from thought to thought, which does not restrict ideas from emerging as they might in a more structured essay form. This is not to say that the final product is not very well structured, because it is, it is simply that in an essay of personal secrets, this method is both the road map to the main ideas the writer wants to “get at”, but also tell the reader about the difficulty of coming to writing.
The essay finishes by saying that not all secrets are for common consumption, but here there are strong secrets that one imagines were demanding to be told. Something in the process facilitated the selection of the secrets. In a sense, it shows which secrets are ready to be told as they emerge and recognized by the writer as the one or ones.
The method serves as the glue that holds the structure of this essay together. The essay is utterly disarming and one never doubts for a second the veracity and clarity of the voice.
