One of the concepts I struggle with the most in writing poetry is the role of fiction in the process. I have touched briefly on this issue in a previous post; I will dilate slightly more fully here. The issue, for me, is one of emotional clarity as well as of sincerity. Because I write poetry to capture moments, thoughts, and feelings, there is a strong pull towards nonfiction, both because I can only truly claim to have any understanding of my own emotions, thoughts, moments (etc) if even those, and because I can hardly expect to be able to successfully convey what I cannot validate in myself. These are closely entwined arguments that. together, I think portray what I mean by emotional clarity: I cannot achieve the true expression of feeling with feelings I have not felt. To this is added sincerity: how honest can the poetry be if I make it all up, not just words but basic thoughts, out of whole cloth?
I will here discuss a few possibilities for dealing with this issue: the intercommunicability problem, the imaginative principle, the Browning option, the aesthetic theory, and the denial of the question. I will only sketch these out; I intend to treat each at further detail in future posts. I hope, however, that they will serve as the beginning of a process of working out this issue.
The intercommunicability problem begins with the assumption that it is impossible to truly know if we can understand each others inner mental states. As such, it is almost pointless to talk about communicating such mental states to each other, and so poetry must, almost axiomatically, find its meaning in some other criteria than making one's mental state (or past mental state) open to an audience. This theory suggests nothing specific as replacement criteria; almost anything may qualify. The central idea is that there is no point to judging a poem on its communication of mental states.
The imaginative principle seems similar on the surface: the fundamental idea here is that imagination affects mental states, and so there is no "real" mental state for the poem to point the reader to. Either the reader and author undergo a similar effect from the poem, and that creates the tie of sincerity between them, whether the author initially felt the state being communicated or not; or they undergo dissimilar changes, but in related ways that allow the poet to predict in some manner how they will differ. In either case, because imagination and mental state are so closely bound up, it is difficult to call "fiction" dishonest, because honesty is not the same as journalistic fact-finding, it is something deeper.
The Browning option, named for the Victorian poet Robert Browning who was known for his dramatic monologues (poems written in the voice of a narrator who is clearly not the poet), suggests that it is the creation of plausible, possible, believable mentalities for the reader to interact with that is the goal of the poem, not the transmission of the single dominant authorial mentality. So long as the poem engages meaningfully in the interaction of the reader and a narrator of some sort with a distinct point of view, real or imagined, it may be judged a success; there need be no relationship between that point of view and the author's.
The aesthetic theory points to the beauty of the poem, usually in relation to its sounds and rhythms, as the primary point of judgment, rather than to anything having to do with the author. As such, the question should not be "how sincere is this poem," but "how beautiful is it." Sincerity may contribute to beauty, or it may not; it is in any case secondary.
The final suggestion I wish to raise is that it is quite possible to deny the validity of this issue; for whatever reason, to suggest that of course poems can be fictional, and there is no reason to ask this question. As I have suggested, my own view of why I write poetry makes this difficult to accept, but it is a very valid way of looking at the world.
These theories are of course neither the be-all nor the end-all of the question (even the last one), and I am always eager to hear about more suggestions. I intend, as I mentioned, to cover each in more depth in the future. At the moment, however, I hope that they can begin to suggest how one can grapple with the joint issues of fiction and sincerity in poetry.
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