Who is the poem

One of my gorgeous friends inquired recently: How much do you express yourself in your poetry? At first, I believed it was a simple answer: I’m always expressing myself in my poetry. But when I thought about it harder, I realized there’s some layers to it. For example, every poem I write is not about “me.” As in I, Erika’s Husband, am not always the subject of the poem. Such a poem would be considered a confessional poem, which according to the poetry foundation, has a distinct style, using “direct, colloquial speech rhythms and used images,” that reflect “the relationship between a poem’s speaker and self […] often culled from childhood or battles with mental illness or breakdown.” While some of my poems draw from my own experiences - how I traverse and interact with the world and others - I do attempt to enforce a seperation between my poetry and myself. As in, I don’t want a poem to just be a trauma dump of every worry I’ve experienced. I want my poetry to go further than being an exploration of my inner self and and more an exploration of what it means to be human at all. Poetry is an interesting medium because of how it differs from prose - how it can explore the world we see and the things we feel, and how it intertwines language in this exploration. I mean this to say if I’m only writing about myself, it feels like I’m not using poetry to the best of its capabilities, like I’m not traversing new territory.

Of course, there is an unavoidable part of myself that is interjected into anything I write. This is made up from the literature I’ve read, the TVs shows I’ve watched, really any content I’ve ever consumed and life experiences are going to leak onto the page whether on purpose or not. But I try to challenge myself to not only look inwards at my own troubles for subject matter in my poems. This is the only way I believe I can grow as an author. I see poetry as a tool to be used to understand others - which is probably why it should be mandatory in school. It’s a good way to help develop empathy.