Making Poems

Want to tell the world what’s been happening in your life? You may do more harm than good if you’re not careful.

“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo

Poets, when you set about telling tales drawn from your life experiences, you’d best reconsider some of writing’s defining principles. Your story in verse is a narrative—an account of an actual or fictional event. Though used to instruct or inform, the chief purpose of a narrative is to entertain.

The storyteller is the narrator, seemingly the author, and is always present, at least by implication. If a first-person account, the narrator (whether the protagonist, a minor character, or a witness) still seems ostensibly the author, or one who presents the attitudes of the author toward the events taking place.

Like you, most poets employ experiences in their poems. Your experiences themselves are less crucial to your poetry than your narrative methods and your motives for telling the tale.

Your Narrative Method

In a world that more and more demands you be “politically correct” with every breath you exhale, any social or moral agenda you might wish to advance will bring up an array of detractors, no matter with which side of an issue you’ve aligned yourself. Whatever readers may discern of you in your poem will be used to attack your agenda. For example, if they recognize that you are Catholic, your anti-abortion message will be immediately undercut. Of course you’re anti-abortion; it’s expected of you, not because your argument makes sense, but because you’re Catholic. If you’re recognized as aligned with liberals, your gun-control message is defused. Of course you’re for gun control; all liberals are. Your argument need not even be read.

Therefore, many writers simply efface themselves from the stories they tell particularly if the story makes a telling point about a topical issue. Because the narrator has become an impersonal and non-evaluating medium through whom the characters and actions are presented, readers are left without an ad hominem attack on the author and must deal directly with the ideas embraced by the narrative.

A device writers have used to great advantage for irony or pathos is an unreliable narrator, that is, one who—for any number of reasons, such as prejudice, ignorance, or naivete—misjudges or misunderstands the import of events and erroneously reports situations to the reader. Used by such great writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the unreliable or naïve narrator forces readers to postpone critical judgments because they can’t securely determine the significance of the characters and their actions. This narrative device deflects any immediate connection of the narrator to the author that the reader might make.

However, if not skillfully handled, the obtuseness, prejudices, or naivete of the unreliable narrator may be directly attributed to a seemingly obtuse, prejudiced, or naive author—a danger you must avoid.

Your Motives for Telling the Tale

If you analyze both the motives of other poetic storytellers and your attitudes as a reader/listener, then you’ll learn about attempting to convey personal experiences in poetry. If the storyteller is self-serving, egotistical, pompous, or preachy, then your reaction as a reader/listener will probably be a negative one. What can the storyteller do to make you listen attentively instead of trying to escape?

Back to the Basics

The chief purpose of a narrative, as we said at the outset, is to entertain. Embodied in the precept is the idea that entertaining takes precedence over imparting whatever politically correct, social agenda you might wish to advance, no matter how worthy. Notice that we are not suggesting that you strip your poetry of significant social commentary. But if your account of a personal experience is only a thinly veiled moral manifesto on sexism, racism, homophobia, or other societal topic, it has better chances of success as a prose essay or article. As a poet, you must take into account your readers’ expectations and reward their investment of time and attention.

What does a reader expect from a poem that narrates a story? The poetry reader first anticipates finding those elements essential to all of poetry—excellent poetic diction, vivid imagery, a rhythmic flow appropriate to the subject, and provocative figuration. These elements in themselves give a reader delight. Add to them an interesting account of events, and your reader will be well entertained.

Poets must analyze and understand their impulses to relate their personal experiences. If a reader determines rightly or wrongly that you are only gratifying your ego or indulging in a form of self-aggrandizement, then you are in trouble. And although your story or its content may be useful to your reader, the single most important principle when relating personal experiences to others is that the account must provide pleasure. This “interest and entertain” requirement of any form of writing is what attracts and holds readers. All good writing entertains.

Therefore, poets must always make their first presentations of their experiences memorable, taking them out of the realm of the commonplace. Otherwise they will be passively recounting events, a far cry from writing poems.