Who wants to take risks in poetry if we are standing around in our underpants revealing our private selves?
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This quote is from someone on a listserv I’m on, in regards to an extended discussion of persona poems, the crux being: don’t assume poems are autobiographical.
From my own experience, it’s deliciously tempting to make that assumption. But poetry is not memoir. Of course, it’s not pure fiction, either; it’s flexible: tell the truth, but tell it slant. Poetry tells the truth by sometimes skewing, ignoring, or conflating the facts. Truth is not dependent upon facts, at least not personal truth. Beauty may be truth, but truth can be extrapolated from facts without being held hostage by them.
I guess this seems most relevant to me today because I have a new poem coming out that, because it is based on actual events, is sort of hard for me to claim as my own. I’d like to be able to step back from it and say, “it’s just a persona poem”.
Instead, I find myself standing around in my metaphorical underpants, wondering, what on earth was I thinking when I wrote that?
