Complacency and erasure: the co-option of narrative

[kaberett]

[Content note: abuse]

There is a poem by Phillip Larkin. You know the one: They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do...

It is bleak, and it is resigned, and it is gentle, and it is true.

And every once in a while I see somebody praising Adrian Mitchell's saccharine, self-congratulatory rewrite, and the world drops out from under me. Because: how dare you. How dare you. How dare you take my truth and painstakingly paint over it. How dare you take this thing, this thing that is mine, and tell me that it couldn't really have happened like that. How dare you look to me, smiling, and say -- no, that didn't occur.

You should be horrified by what has been done to me. I will not fold myself smaller for your convenience and comfort, to ease your forgetting. I will not fucking smile for you. Tell your own stories, by all means, but if you cannot understand what profound insult it is to hear my truth (my bitter, compassionate, accepting truth) and to twist it, to sweeten it beyond bearing and beyond breaking, because you cannot stand to believe me -- if you cannot understand what profound insult it is to smiling silence me because you do not wish to hear -- if you would look away and smugly say: the world is not, is never like that; let me tell you how it really is--

-- then you bear the guilt for the children who, like me, are ignored and overlooked and inconvenient.

How dare you chiding, stifling, hush us. How dare you bid us pray be sweet and silent. How dare you -- how dare you -- make of us a sacrifice to your comfort.

Shame upon you.

Comments

[thefairymelusine]

I had read the Adrian Mitchell before, but looked it up on reading this and was (again) incensed. Because the second stanza of the Larkin is one of the most beautiful descriptions of compacted trauma I have ever read, and because as you say in the post, it's the resignation of Larkin that makes it.

[kaberett]

I've gotta say, I'm impressed by how many of you went and looked it up after I'd deliberately not linked it and been this incandescently angry over it!

[davidgillon]

Ouch, not read the Mitchell, don't want to.

From a different perspective, I'm not sure you shouldn't have also tagged this as Poetry:Mine. The writing so beautifully contrasts the topic.

[ghoti]

agreed

[kaberett]

I didn't link to it for a reason. I strongly suggest you continue avoiding it if you can.

[silverhare]

Good grief. I had never read that rewrite, and that is- horrific. It's cruel, and it minimises and it covers up and coats over and pretends everything is all right. It mythologises childhood and parenthood, and that is so dangerous and utterly false.

By the way, thanks for the link to that Carol Ann Duffy poem - it was a really nice gut-punch. (Idk how that could be nice, but it was. I think it was the sense of empathy and familiarity with that situation.)

My father, portraying to me his view of both parenthood and childhood, recited This Be The Verse so often to me that I could repeat it accurately by the age of eight. It made for an amusing Poetry Day one year at primary school, where I entertained my fellow nine-year-olds...

[untonuggan]

aragahgahga yeah I just read the rewrite myself. it does all those things, and it's insipid.

[quartzpebble]

And I could read it as just insipid (which, you know, is true for tons of poetry, and it's not like this one's the worst ever for idealizing/mythologizing childhood) if not for the title, which manages to both swipe at "This Be the Verse" itself and assert that getting "tucked up" *is* the Worst that happens to a child.

[kaberett]

I am genuinely impressed by how many of you have gone and looked it up after I deliberately didn't link to it and was this incandescently furious about it :-p

You're very welcome for the Duffy; I met it at GSCE English and it was a fuckin' life-raft.

(As I have managed to articulate elsewhere, some of the issue with That Fucking Poem is that it's not even something that could be described as being - in the literary sense - "in dialogue" with the Larkin: because there is no conversation here, just someone speaking over uncomfortable truths they don't want to hear, and literally re- and over-writing our histories.)

[silverhare]

:) *general noise of "I read this and yes"* /autistic night-blogging

[el_staplador]

Yes. Poetry is truth, and the Mitchell parody isn't true.

I mean, I do not consider either of my parents to have been in any way abusive; but This Be The Verse resonates. We're all shaped by our families and the narratives and assumptions that lived in our families. One doesn't have to be an awful person to fuck someone else up and, while I'm more optimistic than Larkin and don't feel that his conclusion is necessarily the correct one, there's a realness to it that to my mind is what poetry is about. Adrian Mitchell's take on it is like a fromage frais advert in comparison.

[lilliburlero]

I think the thing about 'This Be the Verse' is that it's done its time with courage and optimism, as it were (I don't think Larkin would have used that quotation as his title unless he was immensely moved by RLS's 'Requiem', and angry at it for moving him so much) and so its pessimism is fully earned, whether or not you agree with it.

[rax]

thank you for this post, even though (because?) it hurts.

[kaberett]

You're welcome.

[shehasathree]

What the fuck did I just read?! o_o
"Not all parentz"

>:(

[kaberett]

I just absolutely fucking can't with the smug self-congratulatory framing most people share it in. Just absolutely can't.

[forthwritten]

Pretty much my thoughts on it. The thing about This Be The Verse is that, for the most part, it isn't the parents' intention to fuck their children up. They aren't intentionally abusive or cruel or awful, and are just as trapped as their offspring. They're replicating their parents' parenting, who are replicating their parents' parenting...a whole litany of shit parenting resounding down the ages and fucking up everyone involved in it.

[kaberett]

Yep. I can trace so much shit back through my family, and it's wearying and it's sad and there is horror, but again, it is horror tinged with gentleness and compassion: they don't mean rotten. Honestly, This Be The Verse has a lot in common with the thing I'm mulling over about love as radical acceptance not in spite of or because of any particular characteristic, but just because -- and, well, I think the Larkin does a pretty good job of that radical acceptance, and consequently I increasingly find it difficult to read it other than as a love poem. I just -- I can't read the last stanza other than as tired, and bitter, and scared, and hoping against hope that actually you won't take his advice and you will do better -- and importantly, you'll do better because you know this.

[untonuggan]

after reading the other two and then coming back to the Adrian Mitchell poem, I kept expecting the sugary-sweetness to lead to creepy under-covers inappropriate touching at bedtime and a lollipop for silence. which I knew from your post was not where the poem was going to lead, and yet...and yet...

[untonuggan]

also I really liked the Larkin and Duffy poems, so thank you for those <3

[kaberett]

You're very welcome. <3

[rynia]

I'd not read the Mitchell poem until today, for which I am profoundly grateful for the many reasons you articulate it here. (Also, the Mitchell drivel just screams so much, "Way to miss the point, asshole!" that I literally muttered it out loud upon reading it.) And I agree with the commenter above suggesting this is also your poetry in the response.

[kaberett]

I gotta say, I am genuinely impressed by how many of you went and looked it up despite my biting disrecommendation :-p

I am glad that you at least had this to insulate you from it, instead of coming across it first with people saying that it's wonderful and far more ~real~.

Thank you. <3

[hunningham]

The Duffy poem is not one I've read before, and wow, so much truth. And as for Mitchell, that poem is what I think of as a cupcake poem, (sounds as if it was written for the greeting card industry). Nothing there to feed the soul.

[kaberett]

I met the Duffy first at GCSE Eng Lit and it gave me a lens to understand the amount of gaslighting that went on at home. It was kind of incredible; it wasn't the start of me getting better, but it definitely, absolutely helped.

[sashajwolf]

In case it helps: I read somewhere that the Mitchell version was written in response to hearing a BBC presenter trying to discuss the original without acknowledging that Larkin wrote "fuck". In other words, it's saccharine, but it's deliberately so because it's an attempt to mock the bowdlerisers. Take away that context, though, and yes, it's enraging. And the Duffy is excellent, in a creepy sort of way. Fuck all gaslighters.

[kaberett]

Alas I mostly come across it being shared without that context, with the explicit statement that it's a wonderful rewrite of the Larkin and -- okay, I cannot help with Larkin and overwritings of Larkin but come back to -- oh, goodness, I can't lay hands on it but will keep looking -- the rebuttal to being too bitter and cynical, the have you paid any attention whatsoever to the world, the footnotes and the news stories. People aren't sharing it for the commentary on radio mores; they're exulting in the satisfaction arising from the reassurance that they were right all along to disbelieve him.

In my view.

[sashajwolf]

Ah. I don't come across it very often at all, so I haven't had your experience of people using it out of context like that. Larkin is absolutely right, as far as I'm concerned, and anyone who doesn't think so has either led a very privileged life indeed or is kidding themselves. Or both.

[quartzpebble]

That is really interesting context, thank you!

[raze]

I had not been exposed to either poem, but now I'm just really freaking annoyed.

[carthaginians]

/gently hugs

[milkymoon]

No. Survivorship shouldn't be sanitised like this. It's an insult, as you said.

(... and I've always liked the impression 'fold myself smaller'. Not the action, but it's something I can relate to.)

[frith_in_thorns]

You couldn't sing anyway, cared less.

#gutpunch

[shehasathree]

...yes. This.

[lilysea]

someone recently posted the Adrian Mitchell to dw, and it offended me and made me angry, and you have elegantly/eloquently articulated why.

(severe abuse and severe neglect survivor here)

[sylvaine]

Ugh yes, all of this. That poem is insidious and awful and pisses me off every time I think about it. It might be alright in itself, but the fact that it's a rewrite and literal erasure of the original just makes it infuriating.

And I hadn't seen the Duffy poem before. That one hurts, for how true it is.