Autobiographical Subjects and Emotions in Poetry

In discussions of poetry, the taking of something familiar and defamiliarizing is one definition. Another one floated is making someone care about a sharing of intimate confidences. Both are voyeur rather than ideas brokering. Fewest words to be effective leads to cyclical definition spin. Sensation-based is something. Poetry is in the body, in the senses and in the senseless outside border of logic as well. It can be just telling a story or avoiding a story leaving a blank spot in the middle where you can imply the subject and feel the effect. It’s general fruitful to consider what a poem is and is good at, why write it and what would make it break and what would make it shift.
Somewhat like Fumblerules of grammar, I expect some contradictions as I think aloud. It’s another go at expect the unexhumed-pricey-junebug-trapeze-act.
I suppose there’s a sweet spot between what you can fill in if unelaborated and what you don’t want to hear again and what is too random to bear that just does no good either. If communicating is overlapping and extending from what is in common, some people like more overlap or less extension.
I want to be absorbed. I want to learn. I don’t want to be lectured to learn but I want to not have my suspended judgement broken by a silly factual error in a poem, word misuse or history or biology wrong.
I would love to stay in a poem without tiring because the person never pauses for a breath and never concludes anything or only is a stack of conclusions leaving no room for me. I detest slanted language such as this opinionated sentence.
I would love to not skim. I want to be held to the text because I can’t predict what is coming, or rest in the text, watch it’s cavorting and trust that it’ll all end up somewhere interesting. If it just twists around and then randomly stops, it’s not very satisfying anymore than a street scene is fascinating until a drop off to dull. Probably at the moment just before something novel occurs.
That’s another dynamic for sweet spot, between novel exploring and reinforcing. When the text extends from shared experience, it may suggest more is more of the same but more of it, or it may mush and mash and push around the amoebic boundaries.
It’s more the characteristic of the company I want in my head than anything to do with the poem. It can be a painting or an architecture that behaves in the same satisfying way. It can be an oral conversation that doesn’t have a lack of self-awareness but does have a wit for patterns and playing with them. All the pretty sentences that are put together with skill are fine but I think I’m drawn to a personality of inclusion, a crooked-laced outlook.
What would be welcome in poems for attitudes or subjects?
Christian Bök sez,

I often joke with my students that, given their experiences, the word “microwaveable” needs to appear more frequently in their lyric poems (since I cannot easily tell, through diction alone, whether or not such poems have, in fact, been written before or after the invention of television—let alone YouTube…)—so I suggest that this fact may be potentially problematic….

Gosh, I agree him.
Poems unanchored in time are interesting but not the one defining goal of poetry. Something grounded in lived contemporary experience, even if that risks being translateable across time or space, doesn’t skip over life data an ineligible. Much is salient. Poetry doesn’t have to end with a moral. Or one shoved sentiment, whether that is with or without traditional syntax, with or without poetic devices. It doesn’t have to come from the heart, nor avoid the head nor be in balance of body, head, heart.
What was it that derek beaulieu quipped? Rules are for people who can’t follow guidelines.
People who play with words do so for love of words, or for love of ideas.
I get impatient when there are words that are not part of normal diction or that assume a limited normal diction and flag anything else as inappropriately out of register. Everything doesn’t fit in life. Is poetry to improve on life or make a smaller pocket sized model of it? Or be its own holy thing separate from life? I like the second option best personally.
Surely life provides enough straight jackets that poems can have a little more freedom of movement of subject.
Words are to carry ideas. Maybe all we need expressing can be borne on trees and birds or discussion of romantic relationships, allegorical greek without naming any family names, or letter shapes. But can poetry not just get into it, into whatever it?
Poetry is a means of thinking and perceiving. It is a bunch of styles of communication.
I am stymied when I try to frame poetic language using King James English as not ironic, or academic word lists as serious.
How do I force myself to read something straight up or not comic?
I’m used to reading conversations even on two levels, how to pare back a poem to a single literal without an emblematic word or acerbic wit? I don’t know how to read or write or think plain, do I?
It’s like an optical illusion of cross-purposed intentions, author and reader.
But then I often see earnest as satire. That descends from my attitude towards myself. My first response to my own earnestness is to mock.
I wrote a dreadful poem that called up dragons and slayers. It’s a signal of what’s going on.
When most in crisis I write most unrelatedly to the threat. It’s for this reason that when people write of or photograph placid things, I worry that they are trying to counter something inward or outward particularly hostile and dangerous. It makes a sort of tenderness. If someone is healthy enough to complain, they probably aren’t too bad off.
If someone is telegraphing ouchies, it’s hard to stay with it. If a toddler falls down and has a boo boo, you don’t cry with the toddler or they’re sure they’re going to die immiently. A little callousness might be healthy.
It’s hard to read raw. Partly because it’s responding to the irrelevant. It’s mourning the light of a star that exploded long before I was on the scene. It’s real for me now, but after this time lag, it is no longer real out there. I would put myself thru a wringer for the sake of something now resolved? It won’t better me. It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t equip me for the future to read something with no long perspective.
If there’s something that needs addressing, it should be addressed by action or conversation but surely not poetry. Poetry kept to oneself diaristically might be an outlet, a device for therapy, but it doesn’t make it art. I’m happier with a found art of a urinal on the wall of an art gallery. Context makes built objects art. But words are not made so finely as household design objects. If you curate them, they are still complaints or frazzled nerves or jubilation. But feelings don’t equate with art, even if you sculpt them. That’s not enough.
There’s a lot I don’t understand. As you work a poem, how do you not change the feeling that initiated, if it came from an emotional source? How would you firm up on a feeling and try to maintain it (and why?). I tend to identify feeling mopey, or cross, or tired or impish or cynical and as soon as the mind lights on a feeling, it’s moving again.
Don’t old feelings naturally change properties? If you can sculpt a reflection of one solidified feeling, why? To prove you can? What’s the fascination with feelings?
How can one keep to tender places without them becoming oxygenized to hard shoe rubber and make something false?
Partly it’s the matter of TMI. Why should I be pulled into someone trying to share a confidence? Aren’t there better people and routes?
I was thinking about how abstraction tends to go hand-in-hand with poets trying to express and capture and dominate over their strong emotions. It seems a defensive mechanism for people to write in metaphor, create a distance from the irritation or pain.
The trick is to not let the poem become that helium balloon animal and never deal with the real irritant. Or maybe there is no dealing that useful. Any dealing would just be indulging in futile energy wasters. Perhaps the abstract is the lesser or two evils preventing one going in hot-headed and making whatever situation that is, for a time, or always, inactionable, worse.
What use is it to write endlessly of timeless or of contemporary and not connect the two? What’s the string that makes it relevant at hand?