The Truth in (my) Poetry

I read part of my Sun Daddy sequence at Café Writers on Monday night and was surprised when someone in the ladies toilets said to me that they hoped I would have a better Christmas this year. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised - this kind of thing happens a lot when I read from my prose poem sequence. I just hadn't expected it with the Sun Daddy poems - they seem more extreme to me, plus they feature a kind of mythical family.

When I read my prose poems people often come up to me afterwards wanting to talk to me about my (or their) childhood. They want to know whether my family were in the Plymouth Brethren,or to sympathise with me about the horrible father in the poems, or else they want to share their own experiences of growing up in a religious family.  I love talking to people about this kind of stuff, but occasionally someone will say that they feel cheated by the fact that the family in the poems is fictional (even though I usually say this when I am reading them). This always surprises me a little because unless a poet clearly says that a poem is based on a real incident I usually assume that a poem is to a greater or lesser extent a work of fiction. Those same people would not approach a novelist with the same kind of questions. Neither my prose poems or my Sun Daddy and circus sequences are real. I do not come from a religious family - in fact my father is an atheist - but of course a writer can't help drawing on their own experiences to a certain extent. There are concrete details in my poems that are directly stolen from my own childhood, and one or two of the prose poems stemmed from things half remembered, which I used as a kind of springboard for the poems, expanding and changing events to suit the needs of the poems. It is these concrete details that make the poems seem believable. The Sun Daddy poems were inspired by someone I knew, but again I have changed and evolved the character to suit my own needs.

If I wanted to write an accurate version of my life story I would write a memoir or an autobiography. There is a liberation in the writing process that allows one to go beyond what is real. I can explore the darker aspects of human nature. The girl in the prose poems although very young is not very likeable or very nice - there is a naivety  to her too though - she is a product of her upbringing, she repeats things that she has heard adults say without necessarily understanding them, and she has a child's ability to feel outraged by the world. The girls in the circus poems too are an exploration of the dark side of childhood, in these poems I am exploring the way that children can be cruel to one another, and also exploring the tension between cruelty and love.

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.