You Couldn’t Make It Up

(or could you?)

One of my poet-friends has been praised for the honesty and authenticity of his work. As ever, in the face of justifiable praise, he is self-deprecating. “I made it all up!” he declares. Not quite, is my response.

Poets at times feel that they should be reporters too. They assume that their work should reflect precisely what happened to them when they walked down the street yesterday, or had an argument with a sibling then they were eight, or fell in love for the first time. Yet, nobody can hold up the poem and say, ‘you’re a liar, it was a Wednesday, not a Thursday,’ or ‘you’re a liar, you didn’t fall in love right away like that’. So why the need for such ruthless accuracy?

My friend did indeed invent many of the scenarios about which he writes, but this does not matter in the slightest. He is a creative writer after all, not a diarist or a newspaperman. Despite his creative license, his work is honest and authentic, simply because that most important thing – his emotional response to each scenario – is as it would have been, had he in fact experienced it himself.

In short, he imagines himself in the situation and the poem’s protagonist, that hazy ‘I’ that is not quite the poet, responds in just the way he would respond.

Poets have no obligation to anyone but themselves, and their only duty is to be honest. They must expose themselves for what they are – flawed human beings involved in the struggle of living. A poet who does not acknowledge his or her failings, who assumes the mantle of a paragon of virtue, will write pompous, hackneyed platitudes that will seem tiresomely familiar because they are thoughtless regurgitations of proven crowd-pleasing claims to compassion, common sense and decency.

When we put ourselves in invented situations and imagine our reactions, we are scrutinising ourselves and by extension investigating the human animal. If we are not honest about our responses to stimuli, we become entertainers, not poets. We become what were once known as poetasters – and we’re better than that, surely.

My poet-friend should be glad that the authenticity of his work shines through. To be praised as authentic and honest is a high accolade indeed. Whether the scaffolding around his feelings is true or not doesn’t matter at all.

With each poem he builds a house for himself. He does not wear masks, or pretend to be perfect. Poems that are didactic, that tell us how we should feel by presenting us with inhuman exemplars, rarely get under our skin; readers and audiences want to explore the feelings and thoughts of an individuated personality, not simply encounter the same old generalisations and clichéd expressions of emotion. They want YOU warts and all, and in this case it is perfectly all right to give the public what they want!

 

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