Christopher Merrill: Tell It Slant—Notes from the Writing University
The renowned poet, journalist, and director of the International Writing Program on creating and preserving "spaces for truth telling."
By Christopher Merrill
I keep returning to a poem that Emily Dickinson wrote sometime between 1858 and 1865. This was a decisive period in American history, echoes of which regularly sound today, and this poem, conceived in a time of bitter division, when it was difficult to sort out the truth among conflicting accounts of events and derive meaning from the waves of grief and joy that washed over Americans during the Civil War, speaks to a fundamental issue of this democratic enterprise—how to create and preserve spaces for truth telling, since this is integral to our experiment in liberty:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Dickinson’s eyesight declined during the war, which adds a layer of personal meaning to the last line of the poem. And who among us has not suffered from the blinding light of truth, especially when it is delivered unexpectedly? You might say the cornerstone of the writing life is “The Truth’s superb surprise”—the kinds of discovery, occasioned by a rhyme, a metrical imperative, a turn of phrase, the demands of a plot, or the development of a character, that poets and writers may experience as a quickening of the pulse, an acceleration of thought, a deepening of perspective. This is what we live for: to work in the language to enlarge our understanding of the world, broaden our sympathies, learn something new.
Poets and playwrights, novelists and nonfiction writers, journalists and filmmakers, all engage in different forms of truth telling—which is a precondition for the liberty of conscience enshrined in our founding documents. A republic of letters is thus essential to the life of the republic, which depends upon a citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. A civic education, then, may be bolstered by creative individuals who choose to serve apprenticeships in literary forms of truth telling, the fruits of which include an expanded community of readers and writers who not only may have a better appreciation of the delights on offer in a vivid poem or short story but an enhanced ability to discern the truth, which in an age of rampant disinformation— #FakeNews—is critical to the survival of democracy. Ernest Hemingway said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
When lightning strikes, writers summon all that they know and much that they do not know in order to dazzle their readers gradually, with truths that may change their lives.
Needless to add that literary truths come in a wide array of guises, from straight reportage to surrealist juxtapositions to hybrid forms mixing prose and poetry, technological advances and teleological narratives, and a seemingly infinite range of creative expressions in between. When lightning strikes, writers summon all that they know and much that they do not know in order to dazzle their readers gradually, with truths that may change their lives.
In the early 1990s, while reporting from the war zones of the former Yugoslavia, I often heard an adage attributed to the Prussian military theorist, Claus von Clausewitz, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” For propaganda reigns in the fog of war, facts about troop movements, battles, and strategy are in continual dispute, and it is easy to fall into the trap of imagining that one knows more than one does. Whenever I felt I was losing perspective—the first sign was usually hearing myself parrot an argument from one side of the conflict or another—I resolved to travel to the other side as soon as possible.
Suffice to say that Vladimir Putin’s justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which depends on a false narrative of Ukrainian history, has brought back many interviews I conducted in the former Yugoslavia, with people from all walks of life who used flawed histories to justify atrocities committed by their countrymen. Beware of anyone who claims to have history on their side. “Here is something we can all count on,” wrote the Serbian-American poet Charles Simic, who, sadly, passed away earlier this month at the age of 84. “Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.” This is why he believed that lyric poets “perpetuate the oldest values on earth. They assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe.” What a literary education can inspire is a lifelong search for new ways to express those oldest values on earth.
The shock that Ukrainians felt when Russian forces invaded their country was surely similar to what Sarajevans felt when their Serbian countrymen besieged the city just eight years after it had hosted the Winter Olympics, or what New Englanders felt when Fort Sumpter was shelled. It is not as difficult as you might think for a political leader skilled in the darker arts of persuasion to convince some element of his citizenry to think tribally. The courageous Serbian journalist Miloš Vasić, founding editor of an independent weekly in Belgrade, Vreme, explained in a memorable fashion his countrymen’s support for what the International Criminal Court at The Hague would prosecute as crimes against humanity:
All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinistic, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years… You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line—a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.
His prediction was borne out by the January 6th insurrection. And I trace my fascination with different forms of truth telling, each of which can contribute to a greater understanding of our walk in the sun, not only to what I have witnessed in war zones from the Balkans to Iraq and Afghanistan but to the growing divisions in our own country. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” I’m lucky in that in the town I call home—Iowa City, Iowa, which is a UNESCO City of Literature, home to the University of Iowa, the International Writing Program, which I direct, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—are instructions, space, and time for discovering “what is found there.”
It turns out that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was not the world’s first degree-granting creative writing program. That distinction belongs to the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, which was founded in 1933. Joseph Stalin’s bid to create a new species of human being, Soviet poeticus, coincided with the Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, which led to the deaths of nearly four million people—the first methodically planned genocide, in this case by starvation, in the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
This was the same year that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, marking the beginning of the Third Reich, which would sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union to divide up Poland, while here in the heartland, the idea of fostering creativity, seeded by Dean Carl Seashore’s decision, in 1922, to grant graduate credit for creative work, would transform the landscape of American higher education. The Workshop was established in 1936, in the midst of a devastating drought, a plague of grasshoppers, and the continuing misery of the Great Depression. This was hardly a propitious moment to launch such a radical program. But the history of ideas suggests that it is at precisely such dark moments that humankind may rise to the challenge and effect momentous change. Surely we have arrived at such a moment with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It was also in 1936 that Paul Engle, the son of a horse trader in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and one of the first recipients of the MA degree in creative writing, took his honeymoon in Moscow and Berlin. And it is tempting to imagine that his tenure as the Workshop’s longest serving director and co-founder of the International Writing Program was shaped by what he witnessed abroad. In Berlin, for example, a Jewish bookseller gave him several fine editions by the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke, and asked him to help his teenage daughter escape from Germany. Engle’s letter to the bookseller was returned, stamped Disappeared—a failure that haunted him. He went on to help writers at every stage of their career, some of whom were in grave danger. I am happy to report that the IWP continues to offer safe haven to writers at risk, most recently from Myanmar and Afghanistan. And we have reached out to Ukrainian alumni of our fall residency and summer writing program for high-school students, holding them in our thoughts and prayers even as we prepare to seek places for them to live in safety.
Every voice matters in the world of literature, because it contains the possibility of opening our eyes to what we most need to hear.
The Workshop model pioneered at Iowa, a literary apprenticeship rooted in the promise of democratic access central to public education, has spawned hundreds of undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs here and abroad, proving to be more productive than what was on offer at the Gorky Institute, which inspired no imitations in the USSR; with the demise of the USSR the number of creative writing programs doubled in the Russian Federation, one less than the three MFA creative writing programs in Iowa alone. The innovative Iowa idea to bring together artists and scholars in an academic setting succeeded beyond what anyone might have imagined in the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska declared in her Nobel lecture that “inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally:
There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners—and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
“To be born in a time and a place is not to join a national destiny,” the historian Timothy Snyder recently observed, in a commentary on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “Independence must be declared again and again, generation after generation, individual by individual.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of writers, who must not only master the art and craft of their chosen genre but declare their independence from their literary masters, the writers who first inspired them to take pen to paper. “Freedom is made not born,” Snyder concludes. To which I would add: it is grounded in an unwavering determination to tell the truth. Which is why the movement to restrict the teaching of history is an anathema to writers. Here is how we know truth telling is critical to a democracy: Book banning is back in vogue. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye—these and many other books have caught the attention of those who do not wish to have their children enjoy the complicated mixture of delight, taboo, and uncertainty, that comes with reading any book that challenges our assumptions. For shame.
Since its founding in 1967, the IWP has hosted some 1,600 writers from 150 countries, and what they teach us is how little we may know about other literary traditions and ways of being in the world. But every voice matters in the world of literature, because it contains the possibility of opening our eyes to what we most need to hear. I think of my close friendship with the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who described himself as a triple exile, from Kashmir, India, and Urdu. He was nothing if not diverse, and he celebrated differences at every turn. He was the wittiest person I have ever known, flamboyantly gay, a Shia Muslim who liked to cook pork for his Jewish and Gentile friends. He was my older daughter’s godfather, and when she was christened in the Episcopal Church my wife asked him if he had any reservations about assenting to Anglican creeds. “I take it all metaphorically,” he said.
In 2000, when I became director, my dear friend Agha was the first poet I invited to read at the IWP. He was dying of the same form of brain cancer that had taken his mother’s life, and he recited his poems from memory, his eyesight having failed. After he died the next year, he was buried on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts—which was also my birthplace. For as she wrote: “Success in circuit lies.” Let Shahid have the last word:
Stationary
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly 40 languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
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