The truth in poetry

There is some dispute over whether confessional poetry always has to remain true to the facts being written about. My stance would be that if you are writing an autobiography in verse then you should try and stay true to the facts as you know them, however, for individual poems it is better to say true to the poem itself.

Many beginner poets (and more established writers!) get hung up about writing about an event exactly as they remember it –

Say you want to write about a particular road trip that you went on as a child – in writing the poem you want to somehow recapture the feeling that being on the road trip gave you.  You start writing your poem but a few drafts down the line you find it is still not quite working.

You take the poem to a work-shopping group and are flummoxed when they don’t quite “get” the poem; they suggest taking some of the details out. You are resistant because you have written events exactly as they happened.

At this point it is clear that the poem is not working as it is and you need to make a decision – the poem is trying to capture a feeling, and that feeling might be better evoked by changing or eliminating some of the facts – facts that are not serving the purpose of the poem. Your other choice is to try and re-write the poem or write the experience as prose where chronological order and the facts are more important.  It’s a tough choice but as you become more experienced as a writer you realise that your writing moves beyond you anyway and it becomes easier to not be so precious about the initial inspiration for a poem and recognize that the poem has grown and evolved into a being all of its own.

My own writing improved tremendously when I stopped writing in such a personal way. It’s not that I no longer write personal poetry - I do, but I write it in a different way. It no longer beats you about the head with its personalness  - one of my MA tutors described it as relentlessly personal – personal to the point in which it excluded the reader. If you are writing to be read - and let’s be honest most people are, then you want your poem to speak to the reader and for them to be moved by it. This is what some writers call the greater truth of writing – the poem might not be entirely true (or true at all!) but if the reader believes in it then it has a universal truth.

Losing the "heart" in my poems...

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the way in which my writing is changing. It is hard to pinpoint whether it is being on the Creative Writing MA that has brought about the change or whether it is the fact that my mother died earlier this year - or if one event feeds off of the other bringing about a more dramatic change than either factor would necessarily bring about on its own.

What I have noticed of late is that I seem to have finally moved beyond the need to always always be writing intensely personal poems about my dysfunctional family and my childhood. I guess that these are subjects that I will naturally keep coming back to as they are my history, so of course have played a big part in making me who I am as a writer (and a person), but it feels good for my writing to not be so interminably bound up with the past. Maybe my mother's death was the catalyst that I needed to finally be able to let go of any remaining residual anger and bitterness, or maybe I have just written enough about all that stuff for now.

My worry now though is that without this intensely personal element that my writing won't be so strong. When I showed my partner the second draft of my first journey poem his initial comment was "very descriptive". Whilst this was not a criticism I am beginning to worry about whether description is all there is, and if so is this a bad thing? Description does not necessarily engage the reader in the same way as something containing more of an element of human experience. I suppose what I am really getting at is that I have a fear that the "heart" might go out of my poems. There has to be something in a poem that speaks to the reader, that touches them in some way and I am worried that my new journey poems might not do that. I shall be very interested to hear what my tutor has to say on Tuesday.

I have an interesting mix of poems for my submission this semester: a series of poems about sorting out my mother's house after her death, the new journey poems and then there are also some slightly odd poems like the one about chopping off my own head.