True story, I’ve often told my peers in poetry workshops, where fellow writers gather to read and discuss each other’s work. The workshop is a sacred space where communities are built, where feedback is given and received, and where we reveal difficult emotions and experiences. I’ve been in several workshops where my peers have gone to great lengths to let us know, I’m not the speaker. Vulnerability can seem daunting. This fear can motivate some writers to write from a persona that differs from themselves in obvious ways—age, sex, occupation—but also, they might choose to write about matters that seem less personal and/or emotional, so the reader is less drawn to assume the poem’s content is true of the writer.
One might ask, if we create fictional characters in novels and other media, why not in poetry? Plenty of poets have created narratives and will continue to do so. But what I find most compelling in stories, poems, etc. is truth. The emotional meat and bone of a piece of art. If a writer is more willing to confide in me, the reader, I find myself more open to receiving the work, more permeable to experience what the speaker experiences. In this way, the poem itself is the experience of the poet on their quest for a truth about whatever they are processing/going through as they write. By no means am I saying that good poems must be confessional or autobiographical. By truth I mean the emotional tenor of the poem must be present and plenteous, urgent, and genuine; and there must be vivid details that bring the poem to life.
Poetry came into my life at a time when absolutely nothing made sense. It was early in the pandemic when everywhere lay death and isolation. I found myself grieving the loss of my grandma, one of the most important people in my life, bringing to the forefront of my mind both the physical and mental issues I had been avoiding. I believed that avoiding the truth would solve my suffering.
Roughly three years ago, I enrolled in my first poetry class, around the time I began psychotherapy. It was then, at a virtual poetry reading, that I heard the current Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, read her poem “Relentless.”
How strange this silent longing for death,
[excerpted from Limón’s “Bright Dead Things”]
as if you could make the sun not come up,
the world’s wheeling and wheeling its seasons
like a cruel continuation of stubborn force.
But that’s not how it happens. Instead, light
escapes from the heart’s room and for a moment
you believe the clock will stop itself. Absence.
The next thing I knew, I was in tears. A sort of ugly heaving came from something beyond me, like an invisible entity had punched me in the gut. Her words felt truer to my experience of grief than anything I could have written at the time. Yes, I thought. Someone had finally understood precisely what I was experiencing, with the power to put that feeling/experience into words. It was then I began to seek out more reading material, which those days mainly consisted of poets I read in class like Natasha Trethewey, James Merrill, Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz, and Ada Limón. All writers I still return to time and again. My poetic bread and butter.
I also began to experiment with writing my own poems, most of which I’m embarrassed of now. Nevertheless, I’m proud of nineteen-year-old me for putting myself out there, attempting to put my truth into words.
And that’s what it was. Truth. As Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself, 51,” “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We contain multitudes. There is room for many truths in our lives, something poetry has challenged me to understand and accept. What is true now won’t necessarily be true tomorrow. The truths of the past can change too—our memory is constantly being edited by our current emotional state and new experiences, new histories are uncovered. I think it’s crucial that we—as writers and as humans—do not feel so beholden to the idea that the truth is fixed and therefore immovable, predestined. Our perception of the world is guided by our experiences and emotions that accumulate as the days go on. This ever-evolving truth is neurologically ingrained in all of us.
Nevertheless, I find myself repeatedly reminding myself that what is currently true for me is the only truth I can speak of and write from accurately. This is how I free myself in my writing. I can write about the present and the past—even looking back at those early “poems” of mine—without worrying about how my poems might age. I must be true to myself and speak authentically, even when it’s difficult, even when I know I might be wrong. I always challenge myself to write with complete and brutal honesty by working in the mindset that I am the poem’s only reader. I must get that initial information, the details, the spark, down on paper before I can allow myself to revise and think more about the poem being accessible and comprehensible to another reader.
Some poems are more difficult to write than others. I am wounded yet complicit. I am sad yet grateful. We contain multitudes. At times, the truth can hurt. But it can also heal. I feel that writing about my physical and emotional challenges has freed me from the shackles of my own misery, my perceived brokenness. Confrontation isn’t easy. I hope it never becomes easy. I think it’s this constant desire for momentary insight, the perfect description, that inspires me to write. By facing the truth head-on—the world’s precious jewels alongside its ugly truths—there’s a sort of acceptance that occurs over time. Writing is an opportunity to validate an experience, to memorialize it, and to honor it. I’m more able to move forward with my life because I know that contained in the truth of the poem, my experience will never die, never be forgotten. It will always be real, but that doesn’t mean I have to shoulder the burdens of those experiences and let them affect what is true for me today, in my body, in the beautiful shambles of this world we are blessed enough to call home.
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He is the recipient of the Julie Sophia Paegle Memorial Poetry Prize from The Concrete Desert Review. His is forthcoming from New York Quarterly and Austur, and has been published in The Ocotillo Review, Pangyrus, Rust and Moth, Plainsongs, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Invisible City, and others.