Chris Forhan was raised in a quiet home. Forhan’s father either didn’t return home at all or arrived late most evenings, and the man committed suicide when Forhan was fourteen. Forhan wrote poetry for decades, working at what he refers to as full intensity—all cylinders running. He then made the decision to write a memoir about his dad. He collected information. He conducted interviews with his mother and other living family members. The summer before his father passed away, a family vacation was captured on a cassette tape that he discovered. A professional colleague informed him that his father had a history of compulsive gambling. He had gathered more information than he had ever had into a coherent story with a start and finish. However, he felt that the prose was working at a lower idle level for some reason. less prevalent. less visible. Everything had been demanded by poetry. For all its details, the memoir allowed him to organize.
The difference between organizing the truth and being caught off guard by it is fundamental to why some poems have an honesty that even the most meticulously crafted memoirs fall short of. Memoirists don’t exactly tell lies. The majority don’t. However, they take shape. A memoir must transform the nonlinear and incomplete fragments of memory into a readable work with a clear plot and a cogent narrator that readers can follow for three hundred pages. The shaping is essential. Almost inevitably, it’s also a kind of self-editing: choosing which version of events makes sense, which emotions fit the story, which embarrassments are worth mentioning and which are subtly left out. Every memoir contains a portion of an argument about the author’s identity, and arguments—no matter how sincere their intentions—are manufactured.
Poetry doesn’t need to create anything. One of the most openly honest poets of the 20th century, Anne Sexton, started writing poems because she needed to identify the exact emotion that preceded her mental breakdowns, not to explain them to the reader or create a story around them. During those initial months, she wasn’t writing for publication. She had no obligation to make the thought coherent, comprehensive, or flattering; she was just following it wherever it took her. That’s what the form allowed. It is not necessary for a poem to describe the people in the room, the year, or the subsequent events. It can end there, unresolved, hanging in white space; all it takes is the moment, the particular texture of a particular feeling.
Experienced poets use almost mystical language to describe something that occurs during the composition of poetry, but it is more akin to a psychological phenomenon. The censoring part of the mind becomes silent when a writer focuses on finding the image that embodies a feeling rather than trying to explain it. Poet CJ Blair wrote about his early practice and how, once he stopped imitating and began following the thought, he discovered things in his poems that he had never consciously acknowledged—emotions he had kept to himself that appeared on the page almost involuntarily. According to his uncle, creative writing is a type of investigative journalism in which you keep asking questions until you find what you’re truly looking for. Because prose has so many other places to hide, poetry rarely takes that instruction seriously. Long sentences, historical digressions, and context-setting scenes all make it easier to avoid saying what needs to be said.
Poetry is not subject to the same pressure that the memoir form does: the pressure of the public self. Contrary to popular belief, a memoir is a performance of interiority. When writing a memoir, the author is aware that it will be read, evaluated by critics, and that friends and family will recognize themselves in its pages. The author may not always be aware of how this knowledge influences the prose. The edges become smoother. The most uncomfortable observations are reframed or softened. It takes a level of consistency that real consciousness seldom maintains for the narrator to emerge as someone the reader can trust and comprehend. It is possible for a poet to be inconsistent. From one stanza to the next, a poet may contradict herself. Nobody expects a poem to have a trustworthy narrator, and it turns out that this freedom permits a kind of truth that trustworthiness precludes.
In one poem, William Carlos Williams described eating plums from an icebox that someone else had been saving, most likely for breakfast. Even though the poem is only twelve lines long and hardly a confession, it strikes with an almost shocking directness. No backstory, no arc, no context. Just the recognition and the act, with the candor of someone conversing with themselves instead of entertaining an audience. In “We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks accomplished a similar feat by condensing an entire world of arrogance and mortality into eight succinct lines that were more impactful than most essays on the same topic. The point is the compression. Poetry gains impact by arriving at the feeling before the mind can set up a defense against it, but it loses explanation in the process.
When reading the two forms side by side, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the poems frequently approach the bone. Not always; there are poems that are intricate evasions wrapped in lovely language, as well as memoirs of extraordinary bravery and memoirs that read like candid conversation. Poetry, however, is structurally designed for the inexplicable, the emotion that defies time, the truth that exists between what actually happened and what it meant. It is possible to arrange facts. Usually, the sensation beneath them cannot. On its best days, poetry knows more than any memoir can explain because that’s where it resides.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.