Joanna Siwiec Response: S. Perl: Revealing Secrets, Writing Poems

[Anonymous]

#624

I am unsure of how to begin this post–partially because I am unsure of whether being privy to Professor Perl’s life has made me view her differently, or has made me view myself differently. The voice of the text was more audible, honest, and vulnerable than any of the other voices I have thus read in the assigned texts. It spoke to me from the first sentence, “Poetry always seemed obscure and stuffy to me, the purview of English majors, not what really mattered as I tried to make sense of my life” (129). I gently nodded for the next few sentences, and stopped reading when the words began bringing back my own memories. My Literary Theory course professor told our class, “A hierarchy exists in the English department. English Literature. English Education. ESL. And then Creative Writing. People think we just finger paint all day in creative writing.” The whole class laughed, and I elbowed my creative writing friend mockingly. It wasn’t until graduate school that I felt as Professor Perl did when she discovered that she “liked the chiseled quality of poetry, how spare it could be, how the form allowed [her] to take the sharp edges of [her] life and turn them into texts” (130). By that point, I have put down my classics, and picked up a pen. And I would sit. And stare. Waiting for my mind to give my hand permission. Eventually it did, only because it found a way to hide me among the lack of words. I soon found out that the silence exposed all meaning, and in a way, I left it to my reader to listen closely.

Prof. Perl’s piece is strung through with beauty, femininity, relationships, confusion, denial, and writing. Out of the other pieces, this one reveals something more than an actual secret. It reveals, rather, a search for escape from a present circumstance but also personal revelations when posed with jarring events. Reading this piece is somewhat of a weaving between an old present and a new reflection of that past. I say this because I notice that Prof. Perl uses a mixture of past and present tenses when speaking of the same event. It makes me stop, and try to figure out who is talking; is it the Sondra Perl of the time that this piece was written, or is it the Sondra Perl that exists in the memory being written about. I guess to make my point somewhat clearer, this occurs to me on page 141, second paragraph. I hear the memory of the past, “My husband’s return to religion may have been one of the fissures in our twenty-two-year marriage” and then I hear the memory in the present, “The signs are all there, but I choose not to read them.”

Another element that I admire of this piece is the vulnerability that Prof. Perl exposes to us. At a conference last year, I sat through a workshop on the “Wounded Healer.” A Jungian term, it is something that I find necessary in life writing. One must make themselves vulnerable to what has caused them pain and still does, so that others are vulnerable to them. I am realizing that this is very apropos to this class, or any other writing class. We show our humanity through pain, in writing.

The second to last paragraph undergoes a shift from first person narration to third person, and for me, it does not necessarily speak as a closure, but as a person in movement. One who is aware of what happened, but instead of living in the pain of them, she lives in a movement away from them. The last paragraph speaks to me of a freedom, and a living in the present. A voice that may not know what the future holds, but one that expects to write about itself one day. I find that the mental healing through the act of writing is beautifully established in this piece, and somehow, makes me want to engage in personal narrative more.

[Sondra Perl]

#632

Joanna,

I think your point about the hierarchy of the English department is true, and very interesting. Why do we stratify different modes of writing, when they all seem to participate in similar projects? I think it’s so funny when literature students say they don’t do creative writing. How is every act of writing not a creative act? Some of my most fulfilling artistic experiences have been working on a literature paper, making rhetorical choices, reconfiguring thinking as an act of beauty. Why can’t a poem be a theoretical text? Why can’t memoir, or writing of the self, operate with the same authority as a critical text? Sometimes we can become consumed with assigning value to certain kinds of writing, and it’s based on arbitrary reasons.

I also really agree with you about the role of vulnerability in Professor Perl’s piece, as well as the role it plays in the very act of writing. You write, “We show our humanity through our pain,” and I would like to take that one step further, and say that we also show our strength. There is an amazing paradox to the act of being vulnerable: only the brave and strong are willing to take the risk of being vulnerable. There is a new understanding of power through the very act of powerlessness. When we write we walk the very fine line of this paradox. I think this is so interesting, and I return to is obsessively in my thinking about writing–thanks for your post!

[Anonymous]

#635

James,

I completely agree about the hierarchical structure of English, when all of us, in some way or another, create art. Any type of writing is in itself a mentally therapeutic thing, and requires a certain sense of creativity–whether it is a poem, or a critical essay.

And yes, our pain does show both our humanity and our strength. I love that you say we understand power through its lack. Our ability to be acutely aware of something by its sheer “nonexistence” is beautiful. Thanks for your reply!

[Author]

Posts