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On writing Ostriches: Ten Poems about My DadThe common man, truth, humour and finding your own voice
Friday 2nd August 2024
Jeanette Burton
A few years ago, I taught Arthur Miller’s great masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, to a group of sixth form students. At its heart, the play is about a parent child relationship. The idealistic Biff, son of the eponymous salesman, Willy Loman, idolises his father. It is a love story, one between father and son, and one which is fractured by the discovery of Willy’s affair. Biff is heartbroken by this betrayal and the realisation that his dad is flawed. He must come to terms with having a father who is distinctly ordinary, ‘a dime a dozen.’
And yet, and yet, Miller elevates this everyman to the status of a tragic hero. This is where my students struggled. How can this old dude, this failed salesman, this bad-tempered cheat, warrant a shred of sympathy, let alone be worthy of a tragic hero? For Miller, the common man is as deserving of our attention as such exalted Shakespearean heavyweights: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear. Willy Loman may not meet the traditional remit of a tragic hero, he isn’t royal, but, for Miller, Loman’s nobility lies in his tireless attempts to realise himself fully in a capitalist society high on rampant consumerism. He’s up against an unfair and ruthless system, I say to the students, but they are resolutely unmoved and stubbornly unable to forgive Loman’s many transgressions. Fair enough. They are sixteen and perhaps, aligned with the younger Biff, still idealistic, still holding their parents to impossible standards, still blissfully unaware of how our environment can distort our hopes and dreams.
Looking back, this interaction was the beginning of the dad poems, if not the writing of them, then certainly wanting to give voice to my working-class father, to celebrate him, yes, but also to acknowledge his flaws, his fallibility. I wanted to champion this East Midlands everyman, this seemingly ordinary lad from Heanor in Derbyshire, to do the poetic equivalent of putting us both in a boxing ring, father and daughter, me holding him up after a tough fight, raising his arm, claiming the win, shouting to the crowd, he’s tired, he’s lost a few battles, he’s rolled with the punches, but he’s here, he’s made it and his story is worth the telling. Like Willy Loman, my dad isn’t a great man, he isn’t formally educated, wealthy, but we’ve heard enough stories about kings and princes. It’s time for the marginalised to take centre stage.
If Miller’s heroic father figure seeded the idea for my own dad project, then it was Jonathan Edwards’ Poetry School course on families which started the drafting process. After I’d finally heeded that much bandied about advice to ‘write what you know,’ instead of frustrating myself with endless attempts to write serious verse about nature, I gave myself the permission to ditch the weighty subject matter, focus on the exploits of my dad and family. Subject matter is a tricky business. I always go back to the criticism of Jane Austen. Who needs to read about love, gossip, family, drinking tea, when there are wars and men doing incredibly important things? Of course, the weighty topics are valuable, but so too are the small, the quiet, the everyday, the mundane, the dad, off camera, playing pool in a Spanish bar, launching the black ball up in the air and over the heads of family, staff, tourists. I don’t always hold by ‘write what you know,’ but in my case it enabled me to find my own voice, to stop listening to the RP chatter of other poets, to express my authentic identity as a working-class, East Midlands poet, with all the rich variety of my background: dialect, humour, sadness, pop culture, love, joy, storytelling. To find your own voice as a marginalised poet is, I would suggest, a radical and political act, because you are giving a voice to the dispossessed, whether that be a salesman from New York or a factory worker from Derbyshire.
I suspect the semi-conscious decision (I say semi because, dearest gentle reader, I struggle to take anything seriously) to adopt a positive tone and a comical approach was also political as often, not always, working-class lives are portrayed as unremittingly grim. Of course, the reverse is also true, the working-class are frequently reduced to the comic relief. In selecting the poems for the pamphlet and choosing the order, I was careful to establish a balance. In life, as in art, comedy and tragedy are strange but committed bedfellows. Think Bottom and the mechanicals in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Think some of the greatest British Sitcoms: Dad’s Army, One Foot in the Grave, Bread, Only Fools and Horses. Comedy can so easily be dismissed as fluff, lacking substance, but poets such as James Tate, Billy Collins, Jonathan Edwards, Caroline Bird, expertly utilise humour, both as theme and as technique, to produce poetry which is, yes, witty, accessible, playful, entertaining, enjoyed by, dare I say it, non-poets, but also profound, often carrying great emotional heft. These poets have hugely influenced my own writing and hopefully, for this was my aim, Ostriches provides the reader with a similar experience. The dad project is my own rallying cry for more humour in poetry, a mischievous heckling of the establishment.
If an original voice and humour are key to the authenticity of my work, then so too is the truth of the situation. And by truth I don’t mean the factual, the verifiable, the God’s honest, swear on my life, the gospel according to Jeanette Burton kind of truth. No, by truth I mean the truth of what is revealed by the poem, what resonates with the reader and what they take away. Again, I learned about this particular ‘truth’ from Jonathan Edwards’ workshop on families and from his own poetry. As he will tell you himself, his poems have his parents meet in various differing scenarios. Which is true? Are any of them true? Does it matter? No, because it’s the truth of the situation. It’s a fabulous ‘get out of jail free’ card for the poet as it means you can maintain some level of distance and protect, to a certain extent, the privacy of family members. I’m extremely fortunate to have such an open, honest and healthy relationship with my dad and very little is off limits in terms of what I choose to write about. I’m still careful though, still playing my ‘get out of jail free’ card, still not prepared to enter the witness box, swear on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Readers have always been fascinated with poetry as autobiography, the ‘I’ of the speaker being synonymous with the author. Sylvia Plath comes to mind here. The ‘I’ in my poems is essentially me, the poems mostly biographical, but the ‘I’ is also a persona, the poems are versions of events, not the events themselves. It is not fact that I went to Egypt to ask Tutankhamun to get out my dad’s ear, but there is truth in wanting to rescue a parent from depression, in a child embracing a fantastical solution, in needing to believe your dad’s ‘truth’.
When Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was first performed, theatre goers left the auditorium in tears. This was, in part, a testament to Miller’s skill in successfully re-imagining a tragedy for the twentieth century. The audience experienced catharsis, a purging of their emotions. But something else was happening too. The New Yorkers related to the character of Willy Loman, they recognised themselves in the ‘truth’ of his situation. Now, I’m no Arthur Miller, but, in my own small way, if I can capture moments of recognition, if a dad, or daughter, picks up my pamphlet, reads a few poems, if they pause for a minute or two, a wry smile on their face, or if they chuckle, shed a tear, if they relate to the ‘truth’ of the situation, then I shall be a very happy poet indeed.