Tell all the Truth but tell it Straight

By Matt Scroggins

Tell all the Truth but tell it straight, 

using words to express the feelings

of the heart, for I have no time to straighten slant words.

Metaphor muddles emotion

that literal description

embodies.

Punctuation and grammar offer

rules and guidance for the purity

of our experience to be shared.

The truth may dazzle fully,

even to the blind,

in the realm of the word.

Meta-Commentary

          Given the opening lines of the poem, this is clearly a parody of Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -”.  With my parody I attempted to express a sentiment that was entirely contrary to that of Dickinson’s original poem as well as her overall philosophy on poetry.  As Professor Ann Woodlief explains, “Dickinson was less interested in absolute answers to questions than she was in examining and exploring their ‘circumference’” (Transcendental Legacy in Literature: Emily Dickinson”).  For Dickinson, words inhibited our ability to fully express our emotions.  As argued in “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -” Dickinson felt that Truth could not be found in the direct telling of a feeling or experience, but required the help of poetry.  She wrote that, “The truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind--” (ll. 7-8) insisting that the poet must present truth in a particular way or she will fail the reader.  For Dickinson, the experience of reading a poem and unraveling the meaning gives us a sense of the poet’s experience.  Truth was not, as Enlightenment thinkers would have argued, simply shared through absolute terms or language.  This belief in the power of the poem directly aligned her with many thinkers of the Romantic Movement. 

          Professor Paul Reuben explains that one of the defining attitudes of Romanticism was a “Stress on emotion rather than reason” (“Early Nineteenth Century and Romanticism - A Brief Introduction”).  With her poetry, Dickinson insisted on the power of emotions to reveal truth to us and, particularly in “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --”, questioned the insight gained through logical means of exploration.  In “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --” Dickinson uses the metaphor of a light to express the idea of the truth and demonstrate her belief in the power of creative expression to reveal it to us.  She writes that the light of the truth is “too bright for our infirm Delight” (l. 3).  We must come to the truth gradually through the lines of poetry.  Poetry reveals truth to us like a light that is slowly turned up, where a more literal form only hurts our eyes like a bright light flipped on in the morning.  Dickinson is not the first writer to employ the use of light as a metaphor for truth and won’t be the last.  She utilized many archetypal themes and topics, but drew forth powerful insights on human existence that few others could.  Professor Lilia Melani writes that, “Though Dickinson's insights are profound, they are limited in topic” (“Emily Dickinson: An Overview”).  Dickinson utilized simple metaphors and themes to explore the deepest and most complex of human emotions.

          My poem clearly does not.  As a parody of her views on the limitations of language and the importance of creative expression, I instead emphasize the importance of grammatical rules and an empirical view of the world in our modern society.  Where Dickinson utilized metaphors to brilliantly navigate indescribable emotions, my poem insists that metaphors only muddle or get in the way of absolute truth.  Where for Dickinson metaphor and poetry are the only means of attaining Truth, my parody insists that they are a waste of time and the greatest hindrance to the discovery of Truth.  To emphasize this distinction I used the first line of her poem word-for-word, but replaced “slant” (l. 1) with “straight.”  Instead of the need for poetic language, or a “slant” telling of the truth, I called for a “straight” telling of the truth, evoking our contemporary need for instant truth, but also the Enlightenment line of the thinking.  The obvious irony is that I am calling for the use of empirical language in the lines of a poem. 

          Furthermore, I attempted to place her poem in the context of our modern society by including the line, “for I have no time to straighten slant words” (l. 3).  In contemporary society, our attention spans have been shortened so severely by our 24-hour news cycle and social networking to the point that we no longer take the time to sit back and contemplate meaning.  Instead, we simply want the facts laid out for us in 140 character increments.  Where Dickinson cherished the process of finding meaning and exploring emotions on a deeper level, we have been conditioned to look past the power of pieces like “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—”.  Though my piece does not overtly explore Dickinson’s poem in a contemporary context, the sentiment is a critique of modern Enlightenment thought and explores her significance within the larger popular zeitgeist.      

          Finally, I again reference the lines of her original poem and flip their meaning in the final stanza of my parody.  Where Dickinson wrote that the Truth, “must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind -” (ll. 7-8) I wrote that words allow Truth to “dazzle fully, /even to the blind” (ll. 10-11).  In expressing these contrary beliefs I hoped to strengthen the merits of her original piece by illuminating the weakness of the opposing viewpoint.  Dickinson spoke to something much deeper than a scientific perspective or our contemporary “microwave information” thought process can explain and I hope my parody reinforced the power of her poetry.

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Skip “Van” Tinkle

By Matt Scroggins

          In a town not all too far from here lived a good-natured fellow by the name of Skip Tinkle, though his friends, who were quite keen on British Literature, often referred to him as Skip “Van” Tinkle.  Skip was quite the friend to those he encountered while surfing the Internet, playing video games online, and Skyping on his computer.  He was so well liked by his Internet friends that they deemed him the “Slayer of Noobs.”  Yes, on the Internet Skip was the most popular in all the Cyberland, but in his home he himself served as the noob to his mother and father.  Day after day his parents nagged him to, “go outside,” and “do his homework,” and every once and a while, “come upstairs to eat.”  He found himself constantly at the mercy of the healthy familial structure that surrounded him.

          Skip’s aversion to the desires and interests of his parents led him deeper and deeper into the realm of the Cyberworld.  With a constant diet of Cheetos and Mountain Dew, Skip would goes days and days without sleeping, deeply emerged in his wonderful escape.  Here he would earn frags and compliments, moving up the ranks of worldwide leader boards while forgetting about the needs of his demanding parents.  As his parents asked more of him, Skip engrossed himself even deeper in this world. 

          One day, his mother’s demands became so severe that in lieu of attending church, Skip instead decided to lock himself in his room.  As the time continued and his Mountain Dew supply diminished, Skip found himself becoming drowsier and drowsier.  As he fired on foes with his pixilated ray gun his head slowly began to droop to his computer’s keyboard.

          Skip awoke to the sound of his online friends speaking to him through his speakers with a clarity that he had never heard.  As he perused their profiles in responding to their calls, he came to see that their scores were much higher and their weaponry more advanced than he had remembered.  Skip spoke with his friends of the game they had just played, yet all insisted that the game he spoke of had finished two games ago.  Skip was quite baffled yet continued on playing, only to be met by a constant lag in his gameplay.  It seemed that his computer could not keep up with those of his friends and enemies.  Skip explored his gaming history and discovered that he had indeed missed two games and had been asleep for 20 minutes!  As the realization overcame him, Skip’s issues all became clear.  In his 20 minutes of sleep, his computer had become outdated and his Internet connection had fallen to a speed that was average-at-best.  No longer was he the “Slayer of the Noobs,” but rather a gamer from a bygone era.  His rank had become embarrassingly close to the nation’s mean and his weaponry a meek shell of its former dominance.

          Skip wondered to himself what he would do with 20 minutes of gaming time lost when he noticed a slip of paper near his door.  He unfolded it only to learn that his parents had left for a weekend vacation.  He was home alone!  Skip sprung from his room and into the bathroom to relieve himself (for a full day is no time to go without a bathroom break).  He returned to his room to tell his friends of his midday nap and the two games he had missed.   Few believed that Skip could fall asleep with such a cache of Mountain Dew and Cheetos as his, yet those that did told his story far and wide on video game forums all over the World Wide Web.    

Meta-Commentary

          This piece is a parody of Washinton Irving’s short story, “Rip Van Winkle.”  With “Skip ‘Van’ Tinkle,” I brought the Romantic desires of Irving’s original piece into the bedroom of a modern day videogame-addicted teen boy and replaced them with digital escapism.  As explained in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, “The undermining of common sense by illusion and the shattering of visions against an unyielding reality are persistent themes in [Irving’s] work” (“Heath Anthology of American Literature: Washington Irving”).  This trait of the Romantic Movement – though quite distinct from that of Dickinson’s poetry discussed above – was particularly evident in Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  In my parody, I attempted to highlight this element of his work in a more contemporary context.  Where in the early 1800s people escaped to nature, today we instead find respite in electronics.  As a youth worker and classroom assistant in Hopkins School District, I see a countless number of boys who spend the overwhelming majority of their free time in front of a screen – particularly that of a computer or video game. 

          Where Irving’s piece served as an allegory for the Romantic Movement, my piece offered very little in terms of allegory, though certainly carried its share of contemporary societal critique.  In Irving’s story, Rip Van Winkle’s allegorical significance arose from his representing the thinking of Romanticism as he escaped from the constraints of the increasingly ubiquitous influence of Enlightenment thinking.  “Rip Van Winkle” was, as Heath explained earlier, a story that “undermined common sense by illusion and the shattering of visions,” (“Heath Anthology of American Literature: Washington Irving”) in its fantastical story of a man who sleeps for 20 years.  In my parody, the stakes are far less severe, but he does indeed wake to a world where his computer is out of date and his parents are out of town – quite the revelation for young Skip Tinkle.  For Skip, his parents are the equivalent of Van Winkle’s wife, who “kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family” (Irving Par. 10).  Her “dinning in his ears” is what inspires Van Winkle to escape to the wilderness, while Skip is annoyed with his parents desire for him to do things outside of his video game world and locks himself in his room.

          Professor Paul Reuben explains that Irving was, “the first American literary humorist” (“Perspectives in American Literature: Washington Irving”).  “Rip Van Winkle” is a wonderful example of the humor Irving introduced in his writing.  The tone of his writing was one of wonderment and lightheartedness.  He created wonderfully imaginative environments and brought great humor to much of his writing.  A great example of Irving’s humor lies in the Note of “Rip Van Winkle,” where he writes of it, as Diedrich Knickerbocker, that “the subjoined note, however, which he had appended to the tale, shows that it is an absolute fact, narrated with his usual fidelity” (Irving Par. 62).  He provides a meta-commentary of his own piece, told from the voice of the persona he has created to tell his tales, that comments on his “fidelity” and the truthfulness of his fantastical story.  I tried to maintain a similarly humorous tone throughout my parody.  I spoke to the ridiculous speed at which our technology advances in Skip’s computer going out of date in 20 minutes and also attempted to highlight the humor in the relationship between parents and teenage boys.  I deliberately wrote with a voice that was light-hearted and wondrous. Though I’m not sure I quite pulled off the nuanced and clever humor of Irving, it was certainly one of my goals in the piece.