The Practice of Poetry

I wonder sometimes about how much our imaginations slip in and influence the way we experience “reality.” When was the last time you had to do a double-take to assess the veracity of something you just witnessed or you mis-remembered something so clearly you are sure it happened even though everyone tells you otherwise? The blurred edge of reality offers surprise, absurdity, and startling new vantage points for witnessing the old normal. Perhaps this is why television shows, movies, and books that use magical realism work so well—their power is based on –what shall we call it? A loose interpretation of reality? A generous interpretation of reality? One of my favorite odd moments in literature is in Isabel Allende’s novel,  The House of Spirits when one of the characters is born with a curly pig tale. That single detail reveals so much about the future life of the character.

We are comfortable accepting fantastic truth in our entertainment—but, as we saw a couple of years ago with the explosive James Frey drama after parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces were proven to be fabricated. When people want truth, they want factual truth.

I have to admit, I empathized with Frey when, visibly deflated, he argued weakly for the “emotional truth” of his story. While the public may not popularly accept this concept with nonfiction prose, what about poetry? Isn’t poetry often a reporting of emotional truth?

The imagination relies on emotional truth. Think dreams. Think nightmares. Think love. The dream world uses the language of non-linear, amorphous, shape-shifting symbolism to offer insights. It functions without the strict objectivist tools of measurement and validation we are comfortable with in the waking life.

In Ulysses, James Joyce explains “horseness is the whatness of all horse.” If done well, poetry succeeds at revealing the horseness of all horse– the truthness of all truth.  

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