{"id":30225,"date":"2012-04-23T16:17:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T20:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=30225"},"modified":"2012-04-23T16:39:17","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T20:39:17","slug":"secrets-are-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/23\/secrets-are-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"Secrets Are Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a bright young writer who\u2019s having some success: \u201cYou can keep a secret,\u201d she wrote. \u201cRight?\u201d\u00a0And my heart sank. Earlier that day, discussing a gift for her brother, I\u2019d asked my eight-year-old niece, \u201cCan you keep a secret?\u201d She put her hands on her hips and sagely reminded me, \u201cI don\u2019t keep secrets. Secrets are lies.\u201d\u00a0In her family, \u201csecret\u201d is distinguished from \u201cprivate.\u201d My sister has taught her children that secrets hurt. Privacy protects.<\/p>\n

That very same evening, a woman who knowingly passed on an STD to a partner without disclosing it (privately defending her action with my spouse and me because, she says, the STD is so common), publicly \u201cliked\u201d on Facebook a page called \u201cThe Respect and Dignity Campaign,\u201d whereby all likers will \u201ctreat everyone with respect and dignity.\u201d\u00a0The following morning, two poems about secrecy, lies, and public and private matters crossed my desk. My attention was roused.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first poem is Sarah Vap\u2019s \u201cSomeone to be good in front of\u201d; the second, John Olivares Espinoza\u2019s \u201cL\u2019Argent.\u201d In a recent Blackbird Review interview, Vap says, \u201cI have been called a secretive person, a private person, my whole life. I\u2019m always evaluating what is private versus what is secret versus what is more generally shared.\u201d I quoted Vap\u2014where else to reflect on privacy?\u2014on Facebook. In response, a wise teacher among my friends shared that she is \u201csecretive\u201d when not revealing some information for dubious reasons, such as manipulating an outcome, and “private” when discernment guides not revealing some information because it is wise and caring not to do so. \u201cHow others may read it speaks to their own motives,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut I try to be very clear about my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the question of what\u2019s private, secret, and what amounts to a personal or cultural lie points to significant personal responsibility\u2014and creative potential\u2014in both Vap\u2019s and Espinoza\u2019s poems.<\/p>\n

\u201cL\u2019Argent\u201d opens with the married, thirty-something speaker addressing himself as \u201cyou\u201d while withdrawing money from an ATM, the money a monthly \u201cgift\u201d from his mother. We witness the solitary act knowing he\u2019d be loath to divulge it publicly. But as both he and the poem itself expose this \u201cyou\u201d who withdraws the money, the poem becomes increasingly, ironically self-aware of the protective gap the speaker heretofore maintained between \u201chimself\u201d and this \u201cyou\u201d:<\/p>\n

You are prideful, you pretend this gift from your mother <\/em><\/p>\n

is her way of showing she loves you, and to turn down her money <\/em><\/p>\n

is to deny the love she needs from her only son, <\/em><\/p>\n

whom she thinks works overtime with never a free moment to call \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Espinoza examines how a secret kept from \u201cothers\u201d amounts to keeping a secret from one\u2019s self\u2014a secret that, as my niece knows, can rightly be called a lie. If the poem is even somewhat autobiographical, it may seem confessional, too\u2014but the speaker isn\u2019t looking for personal absolution, and the secret and the lie are much bigger than the poet alone. Neither poet is seeking pardon in the way that mere confession might. In fact, each seems to discover the secret with him or herself, and to shake a finger at the larger world.<\/p>\n

You tell yourself this money <\/em><\/p>\n

will be saved for something worthwhile,<\/em><\/p>\n

like the honeymoon your wife and you never took <\/em><\/p>\n

preparing for the coming recession, or something urgent <\/em><\/p>\n

and unforeseen, like the down payment of a new used car <\/em><\/p>\n

when the old one dies on the shoulder of the 101, <\/em><\/p>\n

on your way to your part-time job, where you back up <\/em><\/p>\n

the morning commute of everyone important enough to be <\/em><\/p>\n

at their middle-management jobs on time. Commuters would like <\/em><\/p>\n

to scald your face with cups of premium coffee imported<\/em><\/p>\n

from the emerging economy of Sierra Madre de Chiapas\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

As his own hidden thoughts are revealed, the poem is taken over by this possible story in which the speaker eventually traces the money in his hand to a drug-addicted kid, shot by poem\u2019s end. The act of creating the story to reveal the speaker\u2019s involvement in a much bigger cultural \u201clie\u201d parallels the act of the poet writing a poem in order to do the same.<\/p>\n

Both Espinoza\u2019s and Vap\u2019s poems suggest that while we are free to decide which secrets to keep, if any, there are external contexts that want to determine it for us. In Espinoza\u2019s case, it is as complex as financial machinery between emerging and developed economies, and as simple as the desperation and shame that arise out of poverty. In Vap\u2019s poem, it is an old context of female shame. \u201cMadonnas fuck,\u201d Vap says in the same aforementioned interview. \u201cAre we really still talking about this?\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this is so much a matter of cultural studies as I believe it is simply part of a poet\u2019s work: to intuit, then utter, not something that is secret or hidden\u2014for what, ultimately, is hidden?\u2014but what is in fact available for everybody to see. Good poems often elicit this surprised feeling of \u201cyes, yes, I\u2019ve always known this.\u201d Isn\u2019t encouraging this kind of recognition and daylight in so many ways a task we all share?<\/p>\n

Vap opens this question with breathtaking precision.<\/p>\n

The older we are the more secrets we are given to refuse\u2014 <\/em><\/p>\n

I understood this the night we began. As I now understand the nurse-cells for your baby sperm. And that testicles, <\/em><\/p>\n

They help us; they will drag a human soul out.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this poem, both secret and soul must be dragged out of some shadowy place. To speak openly about a woman\u2019s experience of receiving sperm is in effect a refusal to keep secret this fact of life, and the creativity and goodness\u2014not shame\u2014in it. Conception is after all a creative act. The \u201cnurse cells\u201d into which the sperm enter introduce the insects that materialize a few lines later:<\/p>\n

On the night of conception <\/em><\/p>\n

We scattered wasp eggs in batches to the alfalfa. <\/em><\/p>\n

The wasps were to kill the caterpillars<\/em><\/p>\n

who\u2019d eat the sprouts.<\/em><\/p>\n

A lethal business for such a night, perhaps. So may this poem seem a confession, too. But as with Espinoza\u2019s poem, to read this as confessional is to miss the point. Even this deliberately destructive act is, in many respects, a creative one. To thrive, the alfalfa needs the caterpillars destroyed; likewise, the poem requires the abrupt end of keeping secret what was heretofore, for the poet, a private moment indeed. Something new emerges out of the destruction in each case. The poem is stunning, itself a manifestation of what can arise when a secret (the taking of sperm into a woman\u2019s body) is destroyed.<\/p>\n

Who is it in Vap\u2019s title that we have to be good in front of? For her, it may be the newly conceived child. For the rest of us, Vap points to a real and unhidden, fundamental goodness in everyone that is made more visible when shame and secrets among us are peeled away.<\/p>\n

But we musn\u2019t think as readers we\u2019re off the hook\u2014that the poets will decide for us whether or not to put pictures of our children on the Internet or how we\u2019re to get familiar with our own hearts and the stories we tell ourselves. Espinoza\u2019s secret money is kept in the pages of a \u201ctwice-read detective novel.\u201d In Vap\u2019s poem, the wasp \u201ceggs are in straight white rows \/ Like braille on squares of black paper.\u201d There remains some mystery in each poem\u2014one that is literally embedded in text. The reader must ultimately weigh matters for herself, not only in terms of which secrets to acknowledge or refuse, but also in terms of how we make meaning, even of these very poems.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Sarah and John for taking these risks in order to demonstrate how sharing old secrets can be a supremely creative act.<\/p>\n

Bonnie Nadzam has published work in <\/em>Harper’s, <\/em>The Kenyon Review, <\/em>Epoch, <\/em>Story, <\/em>Quarterly, and other fine journals; her debut novel, <\/em>Lamb, won the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a bright young writer who\u2019s having some success: \u201cYou can keep a secret,\u201d she wrote. \u201cRight?\u201d\u00a0And my heart sank. Earlier that day, discussing a gift for her brother, I\u2019d asked my eight-year-old niece, \u201cCan you keep a secret?\u201d She put her hands on her hips and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[7219,7218,7216,7221,165,7217,7215,7220],"class_list":["post-30225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-faulkners-rosary","tag-john-olivares-espinoza","tag-lies","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-sarah-vap","tag-secrets","tag-the-packinghouse-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSecrets Are Lies by Bonnie Nadzam<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 23, 2012 \u2013 A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a bright young writer who\u2019s having some success: \u201cYou can keep a secret,\u201d she wrote. \u201cRight?\u201d\u00a0And my 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