“Truth” by Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03)

An excerpt from “Truth” by Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) published at the AGNI blog:

Truth

If George Orwell hadn’t said “myths which are believed in tend to become true,” I would have. And you could probably say the same about truth in a poem: “poems which are believed in tend to become true.” Truth is important but never let it become an obsession. There are more versions of truth than lies.

That something might have actually happened is not the most important part of truth. The emotional truth is what’s critical. With this said, every word I’ve ever written is true. I would swear on a blood-stained bible that each and every one of my poems happened as written…and my fingers are not crossed behind my back.

I used to date a lovely, young lawyer. We would often go SCUBA diving. In a poem, I once wrote: “Kathy…was futzing with her equipment.” She was angered by this line, claimed it never happened. (Imagine, a lawyer lecturing a poet on truth! That’s when I began making notes on what will one day be a book on truth, a book that will become a textbook in the most prestigious law schools.) I tried to explain to her that something didn’t actually have to happen for it to be true. What made the line of poetry true was she could have futzed with her SCUBA gear, and I knew her well enough to know that once we surfaced she was thinking of how she might readjust her equipment—she was thinking of futzing! And a thought is as close as you need to come to action to make something true. Of course, she argued that the entire poem had little to do with reality. I disagreed; the problem was that she was only aware of a small slice of the world. […continue reading here]