Like many poets, some of my pieces are family stories, real things that happened I set down in poetic form. Poemoirs are a way of sharing life experiences without writing a 500-page memoir.
Poemoirs can tell a bit of history or make a point from events in the author’s life. They can demonstrate what the poet has observed and learned about the world. They can grieve or celebrate an event or person. They often help the poet come to grips with an issue and resolve it in her mind.
But the reader cannot assume a poem is about the author’s real life experience. Poets can mix and match truth and fiction, exaggerate with word choice and imagery. We do have “poetic license”, you know.
Unlike memoirists, we poets have the leeway to turn things around, to write any poem in first person, using the I, me, my forms whether or not they are truly our own stories. Like experimenting with different stanza lengths or line breaks, we try out the different points of view and decide on the one that best brings the reader into the poem.
Inspired by a painting that reminded me of a religious gathering, I wrote “Welcome Into the Fold” in first person. I recently read it aloud to a group of friends. When I finished, one said, “Wow. Tell me more about that!” The sorrowful look on her face told me she was right there inside the poem with “me”.
All writers bring themselves into their work. Even if a poem is not a true account of the poet’s life, we can and do learn about her. Her attitudes and thoughts about the subject of the poem are out front and center.
At their best, poemoirs make the personal universal. Readers relate to the happenings or feelings expressed in the poem as they are reminded of similar experiences or have discovered the same truths in their own lives.
Or readers may be confronted with actualities they didn’t recognize or understand before. As one friend commented about “Asterisk”, a poem that chronicles my first encounter with segregation, “A world foreign to me, but through you, I learn.”
Poemoirs lead to discovery and change for both the poet and the reader.
~ xoA ~
Annis Cassells, What the Country Wrought, 2023
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