STopZero

This section will eventually become a clearinghouse for various and sundry writings, tidbits, links and ephemera. It may even host a blog of some sort, though blogs are a hell of a lot of commitment (there is nothing worse than a dead blog) and I’m not convinced the world really needs another one right now.

So, in the meantime, here a few tips on how to write your own confessional poem. This article is part of a series that has been running in Word: The Literary Calendar, a local Toronto literary magazine. Enjoy. Or better yet, don’t bother and enjoy the Homestar Runner cartoons instead – it’s gotta be tough to be that screwed up.

The Compendium of poetic Style

Part Four: The Confessional Lyric

Do you love as no one has loved before? Do you have depths of sensitivity aching for public expression? Have you felt that knot of desire in your stomach and knew it was the voice of eternity speaking to your gastrointestinal system? Have you ever used the word “yearning” to describe this sensation? Have you ever been rejected, wronged and hurt? Do you wish you could exact revenge by launching your every raw nerve in a Decapitation Strike of words too intense to ignore? Have you ever had thoughts so angry, so pure, so despicable, so twisted, that you have no choice but to share them with strangers? Do you, despite your dark and jaded soul, still mist up when you think about tragic and doomed love, how Buffy may find other men but her heart will always wait for Angel? Do you wish you had something better to do on a Friday night than watch Buffy reruns on the Space channel? Well, don't keep your thoughts to yourself! Don't save the details of your heart for conversations with your best friends! Take your roiling self-hate and put it to good use. The world must know that you have feelings too, that you have loved, and you have hurt. And the world will know as soon as you become... a confessional lyricist.

While the Academic Lyricist may bang on about the human condition using elegant poetic figures and references to the great works of western civilization, the Confessional lyricist takes a different path. The confessional lyric has roots in the plaintive love ballads and great soliloquies of the past, and owes more than a passing debt to those tragic, consumptive writers of the Romantic era. But its real lineage, and the source of its very emotive power, lies no deeper than the universal truths that beat inside the chest of every poet. What could be more interesting than poems about one's own personal and emotional life? Yes, the poet's pain is everyone's pain. We can all be thankful that the confession, so long the realm of priests and torturers, is now in the sure hands of a few sensitive souls brave enough to write about themselves in languid verse. And with the application of a few simple rules, you too can find the emotional depth to write about the light and the darkness that struggles for your very soul...

It's all about you, even when it isn’t. The first rule of confessional lyricism is one of the most important - don't be afraid to write about yourself. You may think that your life and feelings are fairly unremarkable and not worthy of committing to verse. This would be true if you were any typical twenty-year-old, but you are an Artist and as such have a responsibility to use poetry as a way of plumbing the mysteries of your very being. People need to identify with your eloquence and emotional wisdom in the same way that ball hockey players need to identify with Mario Lemieux. So don't let your readers down – imagine their disappointment if they take the time to read one of your poems and discover to their dismay that you've written on something, or someone else. It would be like watching Mario play water polo, or Oprah canceling her Book Club. So regardless of your topic always always always write in the first person singular. Take it as a poetic challenge to use the pronoun “I” as often as possible in your writing. This way you’ll set your readers at ease even if some of your references are fictional or metaphorical. Bonus Goth Tip: Goth readers are far more sophisticated than your average poetry aficionado so you have a little leeway here. Goths know their Pernod from their Absinthe, so feel free to write a poem from other points of view, say, a fallen angel or a modern-day vampire struggling to reconcile their need to consume with their need to shag.
Be vague. Though you are writing about your own personal experiences (or experiences just like them) you are no mere autobiographer. Let prose writers deal with details — you are a poet, and your calling is far more lofty and sublime. You can't be distracted by the facts of your life, like how the new girl Raven thought that Celtic crosses were going to come back in style too but still sent you home alone after the Vatikan last Friday night to watch infomercials for the fifth week in a row and you thought you were getting somewhere with this girl when you said you liked her Wednesday-like black-and-white striped socks that they so represented the contradictions in life and she kinda nodded when you pointed out that the logo on your new tank top was a winged death's head which represented the shortness of life which is what tempus fugit means, you know, seize things while you can but why, why, why did you refer to your apartment as “The Chamber of Secrets”when you know that it was the name of a Harry Potter book and how un-Dark is that and if only you hadn't maybe she would have slept with you instead of going to Amatos for slices with her friends, yeah maybe she wouldn't have left you at home writing poems about your pain and masturbating while watching a fucking Bowflex commercial. But I digress. Let me try this again:
Be vague. Your job is to find something beyond the everyday, beyond the pointless march of pedestrian reality. Your job is to find the eternal truths that lie at the sublime heart of all your personal experiences, and the best way to do so is to follow one of lyric poetry’s greatest rules: while truth may be precise, eternal truth is as vague as a dream about the light of setting suns. Yes, transcendental wisdom is vague, and the best way to capture it in poetry is to employ as many hazy, imprecise images as possible. Here’s a starter kit: breathing is vague; moisture is vague; memory is vague; darkness is vague; skin is your largest organ, and vague; taste is vague; brevity is vague; light is both a particle and a wave but is also vague; shadows, well, shadows are quite mysterious and very very vague; beauty is vague; fire is vague; and the soul is the vague core of all things. Once you have your collection of images, compare them to each other using similes. Bonus marks for framing it as if it were a dream:

Dreaming of your moist breath
is like the memory of your darkness
your skin is like moonlight
I taste it, briefly
but wake only to the mystery of your shadow
your beauty
its fire burns like my soul.

Pure fuckin’ wisdom.
But not too vague. Life is about contradiction, about the yin and the yang, about the binary play of opposites. It is a struggle between goodness and evil, light and darkness, Coke and Pepsi. Here's a quick tip: the best way to embrace contradiction in your writing is to add very precise adjectives to your very vague nouns. Let’s rewrite the last lines of our poem pretending that our ethereal images were actually things of precision. Let's pretend, for a moment, that they were, say, knives or broken glass (for what could be more precise - ouch!):

your skin slices like moonlight
I taste it, briefly
but wake only to the piercing mystery of your shadow
the sharp edges of your beauty
its fragile fire cuts like my shattered soul.

See how easy this is? Whisper that into an open ear and watch your sex life improve!
There is nothing funny about your love. Nothing.
What sounds like poetry IS poetry. This is really one of the greatest principles of all lyrical writing, so I've saved it for last: the main burden of the poet is to make their words sound as much like poetry as possible. If they didn't, how would people know? Fortunately, making things sound like poetry isn't all that hard. In fact, here's a tip so simple you may not believe it possible: drop the articles. Yes, the little words a and the are what truly stands between prose and poetry. Don't believe me? Try it. All you need is a line with a lot of articles, say this one: “The door opened - a strong wind from the Chamber of Secrets blew the candles, and the room was cast in a flickering light.” Now drop the articles and a few prepositions. As bonus principle, remember that poetry must look like poetry as well, so add line breaks randomly throughout your text. Following these simple rules, we have an instant poem:

door opened
strong wind from chamber
secrets blew candles
room cast in flickering light

What a poem. Thanks, Harry!

There you have it, all the tools you need! Now get writing - your readership yearns. And remember to thank Word, The Literary Calendar for helping you profit from all your emotional crises!