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Giving Yourself Permission to “Lie” in Your Poetry
It's poetry, not a peer-reviewed scientific article.
[This article is syndicated with permission from The Poetry Lab]
As poets, we often use poetry to process or bear witness to the multitudes of human experiences. I am no stranger to autobiographical poetry — the subtitle of my book, Survived By is “A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems” — and even with “autobiographical” poems, there is room for some “lies.”
To determine where you stand on lying within your poems, here are some questions to ask yourself:
1) IS THE PURPOSE OF THE POEM ACCURACY OR EFFECT?
Is your goal to convey events exactly as they took place? Or is it to evoke a feeling in the reader? In one of the many writing pages I follow, I saw a meme that said something like “If you want to read writing that makes sense, read a scientific paper, not a poem.” (I’ve attempted to track down where I saw this, but since I, like many zillennials, spend hours scrolling on multiple pages, I have no idea where or when I saw this post.)
I will expand on the sentiment of this meme floating somewhere in the ether: If you want to read writing that reflects events exactly as they happened, read a…
