Don't let the truth get in the way of a good poem

On exploring and making the most of your poetic licence

Image credit: Kelly M Lacy

Yesterday afternoon, I was listening to the latest episode of Molly Naylor’s Making Trouble podcast. Molly’s guest this week is Andrew McMillan, and it’s as fascinating a conversation as you’d expect. It also inspired this post.

Andrew speaks of how, for many readers, there’s an assumption that everything in a poem is true. And therefore, every thought or idea expressed in a poem genuinely belongs to the poet. It extends beyond thoughts or ideas to actions and events.

This became increasingly apparent to Andrew when he published his début novel, Pity, after arguably his most intense and personal poetry collection, pandemonium. And how with novels, nobody seems to consider what is and isn’t fictional. It’s automatically just taken as fiction.

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Now, this might not be entirely relevant to you. You might already be well-versed in writing poems fully detached from your everyday life, where the poetic “I” is blatantly not a direct reflection of you as a person.

But I know many poets struggle to detach themselves from capturing things as they authentically happened. I touched on it in this post back in January, but I want to explore it even further today. It’s something I’m still learning to do as a poet.

Behind the paywall, I’ll speak more about this concept and then provide 10 starting prompts for you to try. The starting prompts present some universal themes, and some surreal or abstract ways in which you could portray them.

The themes are: grief, love, age, neurodivergence, fear, sex, nostalgia, identity, family, and ambition. They might not directly relate to your typical poetic themes, but the prompts will hopefully introduce you to some fresh approaches regardless.

Before I get going, just a gentle reminder that free subscribers can claim a 20% discount throughout June by clicking the nice yellow button above. I’m trialling a new price of £4 per month as I’m keen to attract more paid subscribers across the board.