Gina Haskel, poetry and torture

Watching the C-SPAN broadcast of the Senate hearing on the confirmation, or not, of the candidate who has the inside track to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), listening to the senators question her and listening to her answers, I admit that I began thinking about her apparently heartfelt refusal to condemn torture as, poetic.

Her answers became a kind of poetry to me, since I know that to write poetry is a kind of torture in itself, self-created of course rather than being inflicted by an outside agency, but torture anyway, as exemplified for instance, in the work of the 'confessional' poets of the mid-to-late 1950's. (Sexton, Plath, Lowell, Berryman, even much beloved poets such as James Wright are in this category as is Charles Bukowski). 

I wonder what she, the CIA candidate, would make of my equation of torture with poetry?

If she should be listening I'll give her a voice, a voice that is my own voice but a voice nonetheless:

I'm immediately suspicious of writers who say they "love" to write. It's not fun to write, especially a poem, though perhaps it could be at some point, the point when the writer finally reaches what writers like to think of as their world, which is their self. In this sense I'm protecting a kind of writing 'self' against the idea that torture is fundamental to the writers quest.

The writing 'self' is a supremely self-involved creature, so narcissistic as to believe it is writing for others. The writing self is not writing for others; it can only write for itself. The best that can be hoped for the writing self is that it has the decency to edit its own writing. 

And what is there to love about writing other than to love the writing 'self?' We should think about this! 

For as I understand it the job of the writer, especially the poet, is to honor the responsibility of the writer--to look at the words written, knowing he or she has written them while loving the self, and to oppose those words once they are written; then to look over what's been written and to re-make it in the image of some other self. If this isn't a form of torture, what is? Unless the writer declares that she or he likes to be tortured, which is a whole other type of writing, a genre to itself, self-conscious torture but torture nonetheless.

And thank you so much for your testimony, ___________.