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Only the truly great get Pulitzers by writing about cubicles, backyards and coffeepots. If "write what you know" still applies, how can the rest of us jazz it up?
Years ago my fiction professor casually mentioned that her editors had rejected certain pieces because of race; her main character had been a black woman, and the editors thought that she, as a white woman, should not tell those stories...despite the fact that they were based on a real-life person the writer knew intimately. A year later I read a review in which the author was savaged because she only told the stories of "people like herself." Irony aside, this vignette should be of particular interest for novels-in-verse, or rather, their writers. As we've discussed in a previous article, over the last 50 years casual readers have come to expect poetry to be autobiographical. Unless you're Stephen Hawking or Neil Armstrong, however, it's doubtful your life would make a lusty read. Forgive me, but only the truly great can get away with writing about backyards, coffeepots, and the terrible darkness of being. Nor do I advise anyone set their speaker at the top of Kilimanjaro, or Kabul, or K Street when they've never left their own kitchen. Write what you know still applies, yes, but why apply it to the exterior circumstances of our lives? Poetry is about the interior. Even in the most dramatic novels-in-verse, like Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, in which warfare and genocide drive the story, the writer's focus is always on what's going on inside the speaker. It's about how the speaker experiences these events, not the events themselves.(1) So, for your next poem: if not a journal entry, then what? Employ the poet's way of knowing. Examine the books on our list. How does Anne Carson, for example, write about Geryon's impulses, doubts, and desire? She's not male, nor a red winged monster from ancient Erythia. She obviously understands however, how it feels to love someone who is incapable of loving in return, how loneliness at home can follow one abroad, how it feels to love someone whom you'd rather not, how romantic rivals can become friends, and a thousand other things which she has given to Geryon.(2) Exercise: Take a journal-entry poem you have written and identify the main theme. Is it hunger, guilt, joy, fear, sexual agitation? Who else in the world may have felt these things? Even better, who epitomizes these things? Rewrite the poem, using the voice of that person to tell their story.
The copyright of the article The Poet's Way of Knowing in Poetry is owned by Holly Pettit. Permission to republish The Poet's Way of Knowing in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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