Why the best poetry is personal
How personal experience is an invitation to the universal.
Several years ago I lived in Norway, in a house that held layers of history. It was an enormous house along the Trondheim fjord, built in the early twentieth century. The house had no address, just a name, Saltburå, a reference to its location being a former cache for salt that was mined from the fjord just across the road.
The house’s earliest incarnation was as housing for doctors who worked at the children’s tuberculosis clinic just up the road (the only other large house that was built around the same time). The house was then later occupied by German soldiers in World War II, a stunning reminder of which was unearthed in the large garden one day — a wide-flared, symmetrical cross. The house then later became an orphanage and school, evidenced by aging child-sized desks, chest-high coat hooks and brooms still lingering in the basement and outbuildings (including a post-war era dinner left in the loft of the barn, frozen in some strange petrification of abandonment). More recently, and just before I lived there, it was a safe house for refugees from Bosnia in the 1990s. My partner and I lived there as renters. Our landlord was my partner’s graduate adviser, who’d moved to the University in Trondheim, and bought the house at a bargain. No one in town particularly wanted to live there — everyone in town knew the house, and it seemed firmly settled in collected memory as a place for others.
Arriving at this place, despite the history that seemed so sad and palpable all around it — or maybe because of this — the house and its large garden felt peaceful, like we had arrived to stay in it when it was a time of redemption somehow, an opportunity to make a first home as a married couple, for oyster catchers to make their nests in, just up from the coastline. A month into our settling in, an elderly man came to the front door, and in our broken attempts at Norwegian, we understood that he was one of the children who had lived there as an orphan. He asked to spend some time in the garden, and I spied him as he left the front room, gazing up at the enormous birch tree that shadowed the house, its leaves like torn pieces of gold foil in the wind, reflecting the waning fall sunlight. He placed his hands on that tree for some time.
When I lived at Saltburå was when I first began writing poetry. Looking back, I realize what a gift that time offered, with reminders of history and beauty in location, enjoying the anonymity of what was to come. It was the perfect time to write. I didn’t feel confident that anything I wrote was good — I had written it for myself, and had never felt comfortable enough to share it with anyone. At the time, it was for me, and I was fine with that.
But when I re-read these poems there is still that sense for me of how these lines arose out of experience, of wanting to understand the context around us and our role in it — what it is to live in a place of beauty and with history still visible in the landscape, how to honor all of those layers. And I can see my struggle as a writer to not only identify or give voice to the moment, but to try to hold on to it.
Later I was reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and I felt a resonance when I read: “Does the infinite space / we dissolve into, taste of us then?” I felt that conversation, the same question to the answer I was trying to reach: does the larger space around us have use for us, does our writing make any small stamp at outlining what it is to live? How to grasp the infinite space. I wanted something of us that dissolved there in Norway to taste of us, to be a part of that salt house.
I have a hard time reading the poems I wrote of that time — the clumsy lines and images — but still, it is a starting point. It is where poetry for me still most often begins — at the threshold of memory triggered by an image, in the yearning to hold on to a momentness that speaks deeply. To give weight while not taking away from the stillness, the quietness and the ordinariness of such moments.
That is the beauty and knife edge that poetry is so able to give voice to that I need. It is that quietness of moment, which we experience personally as well as collectively that is most important to me as a writer. How to continue working to place that experience of momentness on the page, to decide where voice and life fit into those moments, and how bearing witness — to the moment, to the process of writing it down — can connect far beyond personal experience.
As I read through what I wrote of that time, I realized that hardly any of my poems contained an “I.” I had never written with the authority of experience, of directly putting it on the page as my own. I could see how it was holding my work out of reach of connection—I had never really put myself on the page.
I didn’t want to presume that I would have anything to say that someone else necessarily wouldn’t — that was entirely the point really — of how moments of beauty and quiet and profound feeling are happening all the time, to all of us. I wanted to avoid sharing personal experience for its own sake.
There are arguments to be made about the effect that a lack of “I” can have in a poem, and when its absence can be used to great effect. But I came to understand how limiting and, frankly, boring this had become both for me as a writer and reader. I needed to find a way to push beyond tentativeness or fear of exposure. And to understand better how the personal works in conveying experience in a precise way — to work towards a distilled moment of clarity, if ever possible, that allows for that later conversation with a reader, as I’d experienced with Rilke’s poem.
Edward Hirsch describes the lyric poem as —
“the message in the bottle,” a “. . .particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other. . .a way of connecting — through the medium of language — more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another.”
Fundamentally, Hirsch pinpoints the lyric as “a relation between an I and a You.” Finding place for one’s own voice in poems creates the space for the you— to let others into the poems, to give some hold into which they too can place themselves. It is the conversation that is essential in order for the genuineness of the moment to gain meaning on the page.
I often feel that when I write, I am facing a mirror. And my impulse is to fight against it. I want to move beyond it. To write through it, to break a hole in it and reach beyond it. That through the act of writing we can glimpse beyond the everyday reflection, pay homage or commune somehow with what is more than what we see in the mirror. Jane Hirshfield writes:
“You cannot leap beyond human consciousness without first going through it; but if you gaze deeply enough into being, eventually you will awaken into the company of everything….
What is commonplace in the visual arts — landscapes, animal paintings, still lifes of wheat sheaves and iris or bowls of fruit — is rarely found in poetry, where human concern seems virtually to insist on inserting its presence. Many poems contain passages of purely outer description, but a poem without human occupancy is rare. [. . .] language lives in the human mind and heart.
Christian Wiman, in his essay “Love Bade Me Welcome,” talks of reading Simone Weil’s metaphor of two prisoners in solitary confinement, tapping out a language of their own on the concrete wall between them over time — of that wall being the means of both separation and communion. Wiman refers to the metaphor again in his essay on poetry, “An Idea of Order:”
“The wall is poetry. Life is on the other side. The wall is what separates the poet from life, but it is also the means by which life is apprehended and understood.”
As I think about writing poetry in that Norwegian house, that sense of separation being the means to communion is not dissimilar to how it felt in trying to write beyond the mirror, tapping at the separation between moment and experience, hoping to find a way to a broader resonance.
A poem is never one person’s experience. Reaching out from the internal is the strongest way to understand and invite the external in. Including the “I” in poems — what originally felt to me to be a means of separating the reader from the writer’s experience — is the essential act of connection. It is not turning the gaze of the poem only to one’s self — it is an invitation to turn the gaze outward, and towards the universal.
