There is no need to be overly honest in poetry.
We are recording history in the most distant sense:
The farthest from reality.
Historians always read poetry;
We're their last resort.
Poets are honest in the important ways:
The mental ways, the emotions' ways;
We tell it like it was.
Only the reader is an is.
Exaggeration is just another word for emphasis.
Accuracy has no real meaning.
Merging stories and experiences creates some disbelief. Who cares?
Poems are either alive or dead. Accurate poems never get the chance.
Poetry is born in a state of incredulity and confusion
That can only result in the rawest of careless observation.
It takes a lifetime to make sense of things.
There are no phrases like "poetic-accuracy," or "poetically-true,"
At least outside of satire and derogative, backstabbing politics.
No one would take you seriously.
But people have told me that I can be inaccurate,
Especially in events shared with the reader.
(Say we were both in a war.)
Readers now "disagree" with me and let me know it.
It's not what you think. It's what you feel.
And they show it.
When my pen inspires emotions, I am happy.
What historian would ever say that?
A historian would never write about this moment.
Yet with each word I sail forth unshored and free.
There is no more need to be honest in poetry
Than to be poetic in honesty.
But even that sounds nice, doesn't it?
So. Tell the truth in poetry? Absolutely not.
Tell the story and let the truth be aught.

11/23/2012

Posted on 11/08/2014
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