Truth First: Emotional Honesty in Poetry
- A chapter from How To Write Evocative Poetry -
If you haven’t lost a loved one, it will be exceedingly hard to capture the complexities that such a loss would entail. Life is full of different emotional experiences, some of which will have happened to you. I’d advise, at least in the beginning, to focus your efforts there. This doesn’t mean you have to limit your poetry to those life events, but rather to using the emotions that you have experienced to inform and colour your work. With some introspection and imagination, you can extrapolate the emotional state that may arise from a more extreme version of a situation you have lived through.
I had a traumatic childhood; my father was a drug dealer, and I was exposed to volatile addicts daily. Thus, I can talk on those experiences directly, and extrapolate the feelings of fear, confusion, shame, guilt, dissociation, lack of agency, self-worth, identity, and impotent rage. I can also easily imagine how similar childhoods and traumatic experiences may feel. But the further from my truth I get, the harder it is for me to write authentically – not without many honest discussions with other people who have lived it.
Compare The Derelict, a poem about one of my father’s clients, with On The Field of Failure, a response to war and conflict, and you will clearly see that I have had a significant amount of direct lived experience with the former, and not much with the latter. I have not seen war firsthand, I have not been displaced, and I have not experienced the fear, confusion, trauma, and dread that I imagine would come with such an experience. The only experience I can speak to is the sterile news reports and histories, chronicling what feels like another round of pointless death. My experience is of a helpless outsider saddened by what is occurring, but feeling powerless to stop it, whilst also knowing that I am safe, in my home, halfway across the globe.
This difference shows itself in the language and flow of both pieces. The Derelict places you vividly in the action. You are right there, seeing and feeling the emotionality that I felt. But with On The Field of Failure, I wanted to emphasize the feeling of pointless repetition, with the entire poem having the goal of setting up the final line of ‘nothing changes on the field of failure’. The repetition of the reframe contrasted against the dulled sadness of each changing sentence highlights the pointlessness of war – as seen from someone who hasn’t been there and who has not lived it.
The Derelict
The first thing you notice are his bare feet,
Black and dirty.
Lacking a chair, he squats.
Lacking a home, he squats.
The second thing you notice are his eyes,
Sunken and hollow.
Desperate.
You walk.
He sees you seeing him.
You walk faster.
He smiles wide.
His teeth are as broken as the dwelling he guards.
Shattered windows for a shattered soul.
He calls out.
You walk faster still.
His sunken eyes suddenly grow sharp.
He recognises an opportunity.
You wear things of value.
You are something of value.
A second voice joins the first,
And then a third.
They point.
They chuckle.
They stand.
Your wealth represents their high.
Your body represents their high.
You run.On The Field Of Failure
Black crows gather
On the field
Of failureIron rusts
On the field
Of failureBlood stains the grass
On the field
of failureOrphans are made
On the field
Of failureNothing changes
On the field
Of failure
The more experienced a writer you become, the more you will be able to write on topics and speak to aspects of the human existence you haven’t directly experienced – or anyone for that matter. Entire genres of fiction are predicated on this exact ability, with wildly successful authors moving countless readers, taking them on fanciful journeys into the previously unknown.
That said, the emotionality and connection the reader feels is real, and has been experienced before, time and time again. Don’t mistake setting, theme, plot, content, or any other aspect of writing for the emotional connection of the reader. It is no different with poetry. You could write a poem about the lamentations of a magical spider saying goodbye to her last child before she embarks on an intergalactic journey to meet with a distant god. There is nothing stopping you. But if you wanted that poem to resonate with anyone beyond a small group of arachnophiliacs and fantasy enthusiasts, you better ensure that the real, grounded, and human emotionality of the moment is being conveyed – fear, excitement, trepidation, hope, awe, etc. If you don’t, the reader will be lost and will not care. The good news is that you have likely felt such feelings before and can thus use your imagination to extrapolate those feelings onto a unique situation and thus produce said poem. Obviously this example is highly fanciful, but it serves a point. You can write on whatever you like, but the more you have experienced whatever is truly at its core – the emotionality – the better the end result will be.
I would like to contrast two poems, that on the surface seem to be discussing the same thing Setraline and Take The Damn Pill. These poems both focus on the topic of medication for mental health but approach them from vastly different perspectives. I wrote Take The Damn Pill as a response to multiple people in my life significantly struggling with mental health concerns. They were given medication which, from my perspective, seemed to be working. Yet for some reason unfathomable to me at the time, they stopped taking it and were predictably suffering with their same old problems. On the other hand, Setraline was written from the perspective of someone on the medication – sharing an insider view of the real impacts of taking it upon my mental state.
Take The Damn Pill
Take the damn pill,
You’re on it for a reason.
It’s to stop you feeling ill,
To keep you from self-treason.Sure, you’re feeling fine,
But how long will it last?
You know you’re not divine,
Just look back at your past.There was that time you went cold turkey,
When you knew it would be fine.
Instead, your mind went murky,
And you turned to a life of crime.Or when you got the jitters,
So bad you couldn’t sleep.
Feeling your skin crawling with critters,
Causing you to weep.Or that time you almost died,
When depression came back strong.
Or the time that you lied,
To yourself that something wasn’t wrong.Take the damn pill,
You’re on it for a reason.
I don’t want to be reading your will,
As the last act of the season.Sertraline
Medication?
More like calcification.The myopic solution;
Replacing anxiety
With apathy.Losing focus,
Focusing
On what I have lost.My thoughts,
Circle the drain.
Both hope and fear
Falling in turn.I am lost.
A rudderless raft,
Left to drift
Upon a dead calm lake.Fog obscures the bank.
Fog obscures desire.I am far too calm
To stay safe.
Life and death
Seem equally desirable.I drift.
Cold rationality;
The last remaining
Life preserver.The small subtle voice
Whispering
That this too shall pass;
The sun will shine,
The wind will blow,
And I will have purpose once more.
Two poems on the same topic, yet vastly different in execution and emotionality. I couldn’t have written Setraline had I have not experienced it directly, nor could I have written Take The Dam Pill were I not to have lived that side of the coin either. But having done so I could, with some reading and application of imagination, probably speak to the impacts of any number of interventions, medications, addictions, and illnesses.
Finally, consider using symbolism that you know well over those you don’t. In Setraline I reference fog, water, drains, sun, and other things I have experienced. I am sure that there are many different things that I could have substituted here, that contextually would have evoked the same meaning, but since I wouldn’t have been as familiar with them, I wouldn’t have used them appropriately, and thus the quality of the poem would have fallen.
Summary
All topics are available to you, but ideally you should stick with symbolism and visuals you know well and extrapolate the emotionality you have actually felt to suit the piece of poetry you are writing. Time and practice will allow you to effectively expand the scope of your poetry.
This chapter is from the book How To Write Evocative Poetry
