Reflections

August 2024

1. On truth

Tell the truth - but tell it slant (Emily Dickinson)

But is it true? People assume that the confessional poem is the unvarnished truth. That it is always a genuine outpouring of the heart; an exercise in self-analysis, a guilt-trip or some kind of internal castigation; a hair-shirting exercise.

However, we should not simply assume that a poem is the truth. If a poem were simply telling the poet’s own story that would not be poetry but something more akin to memoir.

In fact it’s probably far easier to lineate one’s own story and call it lyric than it is to invent a whole new reality. The truth of poetry, especially of the confessional variety, must therefore be somewhere in the middle. It certainly must start with something real. And the hope of all poetry is that this intrinsic truth can somehow be communicated to the reader or listener and can strike a small flame of recognition.

I am often asked if my poems are ‘true’. Poetry can tell the truth like nothing else. It can catch you in the heart with its truth; a sudden swift burn which illuminates the shadow side of one’s own imagination. Poetry can do this because the bones of it, the words, are carefully chosen. Their arrangement - the craft of poetry - is deliberate and artful and not at all accidental.

The way the lines are arranged on the page may straight away tell you something about the poem. A tightly-written block of lines will convey something quite different to a loose net of white space. End-stopped lines may have a didactic or emphatic meaning. Broken lines may have a more enigmatic, wistful meaning. Enjambement takes a thought or image over into the next line, sometimes at a deliberately uncomfortable point. Because so does life. Punctuation (or the lack of it) can slow a poem down or speed it up. Just because it is written and read on the page doesn’t deny poetry’s inherent spoken voice.

A poem is only half itself until it is read by someone other than the poet. The poet invites the reader to contribute the other half and the invitation has its own protocol. Formal rhyme sets up one kind of expectation; deliberate white space encourages a different interpretation. The music of it; the half-rhymes and internal rhymes and caesuras which tie the poem together are no accident either. It is more like a song than a book and just as a song can move us with words AND melody, so the poem can use its constituent parts to create its effect.

As a book has chapters, the poem will have its stanzas, each of which may house a slightly different thought. Or may just allow a trail through one open door into another, often ending without any closure at all. Just as in life. And the poem’s imagery illustrates the words, even with our eyes closed.

But the word ‘effect’ is a key one: it is why a poem is not necessarily the truth. A poem is aiming to move something from the poet’s mind into yours, the reader’s, and will use every artifice to make this possible. Yet truly there must be truth in it. Otherwise it won’t make the leap from poet to reader and it will have failed.

So, is it true? Is lyric poetry true? Well - no. Of course it’s not. Who would be mad enough to write the naked truth and share their deepest thoughts about the universal human experience with everyone else?

But is it true, though? Is lyric poetry true? Ha. Of course it is.