Writing Problems: Shame

In August I am republishing some of the most popular of previous Saturday essays. Please enjoy.

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“If poetry is not absolution, we can expect pity from nowhere else.” —Yannis Ritsos

“He would like to know who he was, but he does not know. He would like to be one, but he is a self-contradictory multitude, which gives him some joy, but more shame.” —Czesław Miłosz

What is Shame?

Shame is the emotion I think about the most.

The English moral philosopher Bernard Williams explained that shame is “the emotion of self-protection.” It is knotted to desire: the desire to disappear, to be invisible, to be so small as to never be seen or noticed. Shame gives a person permission to disappear. It is a recognition of the loss of one’s power and an admission that there can never be anything good about the self.

Shame’s attendant feelings are: contrition, culpability, discomposure, embarrassment, shyness, humiliation, mortification, and self-consciousness. Physically, it feels like a gripping pain in the center of the stomach, expanding in the gut, bile coming up.

Shame is a reminder of our true self, the person who is constantly compared to a feeling of not living up to a standard. It is self-invalidation and self-annihilation. The shamed person feels unlovable, with a too big/too small/too ugly body, and a sense of dread.

Shame is un-transformable because it is a never-ending sinking back, slumping down, and rigid hiding from traumatic experience. It is repetitive and dogmatic. It means shutting down, blocking all emotions, distracting behaviors, impulsive behaviors, preoccupation with the self, depersonalization, isolation, alienation, an inability to exist.

Shame as source for poetry?

One way I think about shame is in terms of its relationship to poetry.

Shame is overlooked as a source for poetry, because of shame’s implication of being regressive or negative. But if we understand shame for what it is, we can see it as an opportunity to let quarrels with the self cluster. Through the constant self-negation of shame, the shamed poet can find a new self—perhaps mythic, or legendary—inside language.

I wrote about shame in an April 2021 post called Five Things that Prevent People from Writing Better Poems. In this piece, I argued that it’s important that poets consider the ways their shame might help their writing. If the act of making a poem is an opening-up of the self to others (through the artifice of language, to a possible reader, or an addressable reality) then shame inhibits the act; it precludes much opening. Shame is the knot between two ropes being pulled: one says “this is who I am” and the other says “this can’t be me.” These competing feelings are at the core of what makes a poem give the experience of something intimate and real, as opposed to the retelling of intimacy and reality.

In my writing, I find shame to be most useful when I can focus on the parts of me I want to hide from the reader. But shame can also inhibit my poems’ success, when shame prevents me from coming out of that attention, and moving closer to the language I want to embody.

Writing poetry requires the poet to be discontent and available to danger. Poetry is the language of dilemma and intensity. Shame can offer the poet a way to routinize the predicament of dissatisfaction with reality. The process of writing poetry entails moving into the self and then moving out: the product is a perceivable form that the reader can recognize. Because a shamed person is always in a process of pushing into their interiority, the portal to poems may be closer to the nerve that leads to the arm to the hand to the pen.

Shame may allow people to more fully feel “at home” in the Country of Poetry because poetry is an art of compression. Reducing the whorl of material inside oneself to something irreducible means knowing what poem exists there. Encountering one’s shame can be a generative act.

But cutting—also essential in making poems—is an aggressive act.

Louise Bourgeois described it this way:

The act of revising poems is an act of cutting and pruning-back; a focus on reducing so there is no extraneous element. The compression of language in a poem reinscribes and rearticulates the compression of the self. When it can be done well, the shamed poet has no choice but to emerge in language. Shame can spark this curative aspect of art. There is always a blank space in the shamed poet where doubt surrounds lovability. The shamed poet wants you to love them through their poem.

Already weighed down

On hot Sundays during Franz Kafka’s elementary school years his father would take him swimming at the Civilian Swimmers School at the Kleinseite shore in Prague (known as Malá Strana in Czech). Years later, he described his shame arising from these swimming lessons:

Shame is feeling like “a little skeleton.” It is the manifestation of constantly negotiating with oneself about being in the world and desiring to be unseen by it. When “all bad experiences in all areas” fit together, the self has been reduced to a raw nakedness. The hidden self is the self of the shamed poet.

Compliments are also a source of negativity for the shamed person. Since compliments suggest intimacy, the shamed person experiences them as incongruous with their self-image, and the conflict of these identities causes a crisis.

If we could practice changing the unidirectional energy of shame into something more expansive—a self embodied not in a little skeleton, but in language—then more poems might arise from shame.

Layers

“Layers,” a poem in my forthcoming book, Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022), deals with the fragile dialectic between desire and shame:

This poem describes a double-shame: even though I was driving, I was aware of the passenger and unwilling to say anything to her about it. She either knowingly or obliviously moved her legs across the seats. My conflicting thoughts—of being attracted by her legs, revolted by my desire, and wanting her to “follow the rules” of keeping her feet on the floor—ended with a bodily emotion of imagining her on an internal and cellular level. The air inside the car merges with the heat outside. The perspective of the poem moves to the Lord and the connection between cleanliness and desire. The poem evokes various layers of shame, desire, cleanliness, focus, and distraction at the moment she moved her legs across the boundary that separated us.

Everyday faces

If shame is something we have to live with, we should figure out ways to use it to make better poems.

In a letter to Ingeborg Bachmann from October 30, 1951, Paul Celan made this observation:

Maybe what Celan meant is that a poem is a generous act that a reader can use; the can borrow the poem (and the poet’s labor of living in discomfort) to face the everyday honestly. The shamed poet knows their own “sanctified, grotesque everyday face(s)”. The poem is their reaching-out, their attempts to pivot through the gloom into something communicative and real.

A poem is not decorative or ornamental. It is a sortie into the everyday world that insists reality is this way and not some other way. It demands that whatever appears within a poem’s frame is important: Slow Down. Pay Attention. Do Not Multitask. Become the Poem.

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For further reading:

Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, p. 365.

Ingeborg Bachmann / Paul Celan Correspondence. London: Seagull, 2019, p. 49.

Miłosz, Czesław. The Collected Poems, New York: Ecco, 1998, p. 374. [Buy at Bookshop]

Phillips, Adam. “The Simplicity of Shame,” Salmagundi, No. 202-203, Spring-Summer 2019, p. 70-86.

Ritsos, Yannis. Selected Poems 1938-1988. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1989, p. 131. [Buy at Bookshop]

Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Early Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 106.

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About Sean Singer 

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