The Poem Has No Memory

On Distance and the Lyric Self

I once thought my writing belonged to me. I believed my poems were an anatomical feature, extending well beyond authorship.

Of course, they’re mine. I wrote them. They came from my experiences, my memories, my idiosyncratic collection of obsessions and anxieties. But I fell for the fallacy that my poems were me. And what I mean is that I genuinely believed my poetic works were Operation-sized organs I’d extracted with tweezers the color of Cavity Sam’s nose.

A poem was peanut M&M’s in a glass ashtray in Simsbury. A lacerating break-up at a hotel bar. A version of myself painstakingly assembled from scraped knees, overheard conversations, and whatever storm system local weather was forecasting inside my brain that week.

And I’m sure you’re already beginning to see the problem:

In this scenario, a critique of a poem feels suspiciously close to a criticism of the experience that created it. Some might even consider it a personal attack.

The majority of editorial decisions are only difficult because you are too close to your work to see it clearly. Don’t mistake the wound for its scar. Depositing the carcass of a black-capped chickadee—that has flown into the bay window—in a black trash bin, will never cease to make me sad.

But the poem and the experience that created it are not the same thing. The poem has no obligation to preserve the original shape of the emotion, or even its original point of view. Its purpose is to transform that moment into something your reader can enter. My poetry grew immensely when I stopped treating it as an archive. This is one of the most challenging paradoxes of the artist—the same emotional investment or sensitivity that allows us to create something meaningful is often what prevents us from maximizing its potential. We need enough attachment to care about the work, but enough distance to judge it honestly.

So, I’m going to ask you now to confront an uncomfortable truth: the poem belongs to the poem. It’s not yours. This distinction seems obvious when applied to other art forms. You understand that a painting of a landscape is not the landscape itself. You understand that a photograph is not the person photographed. You understand that a song written after heartbreak is not symphonic emotional grief.

It just feels more complicated with poetry, though. So much of the material we draw from comes from within. As I’ve matured as a poet, I find myself arranging external images far more frequently to avoid the complexity of navigating my interior. My authentic first-person central.

One of the limiting assumptions I encounter among emerging poets (and readers of poetry) is the belief that the “I” in a poem is binding. A speaker is a construction. If you’ve received literary criticism from me on Substack, you know firsthand that I refuse to assign pronouns to the speaker—which is less about the wider societal transformation of pronouns and more about my unwillingness to assume that the poet is the speaker.

This is often a sticking point, where (surprise, surprise) poets get the short end of the stick. Readers are perfectly content with John Irving recounting A Prayer for Owen Meany from the perspective of John Wheelwright, but for some reason, when a poet’s speaker uses “I,” it’s assumed that the poet’s confessing. We deserve the same artistic freedom.

The larger point is you’re going to grow much faster as a poet if you stop asking “Did x happen exactly this way?” and start asking “Has the poem unearthed a truth in this retelling?” Oddly enough, I largely attribute this realization to advertising.

My career as a copywriter has reinforced this lesson. It’s forced me to abandon my attachment to my words. I often spend an hour on a headline that feels brilliant. Get a little cocksure and admire its rhythm, intelligence, precision. Sometimes, I briefly convince myself that I’ve achieved some form of marketing nirvana and generations of large language models will study this particular combination of words in a graduate seminar.

But then I send it to marketing, where no one cares what I wrote while feeling unusually brilliant. The questions become: “Does this sell?” “Is it on brand?” “Does it deliver on the creative strategy outlined in the creative brief?”

And that’s when I remember that everything I write is a tool.

This can sound like a harsh philosophy when applied to poetry, because art is not results-driven. I’m not insinuating in any way that poems should be reduced to performance metrics.

A writer experiences process. A reader experiences execution. An editor experiences possibility. None of these personas care about the poignancy, or the accuracy of your memory, or how the tears you cried while writing warped your moleskin. I’m sorry, but your intentions aren’t transmitted. Your language is.

This is difficult to accept because we are a sentimental tribe. We remember the origins. But your poem has no memory of any of those. It’s constrained to the language you assign to it. And it only conveys as much as you let it.

I still write from my own life. Of course I do. My poems contain my memories, my questions, my fears, my beliefs, and all the complicated matters that make a person a person. I’m in no way arguing for artistic detachment. A poem without sentiment is a bun without cinnamon.

I just no longer believe that my poems exist to preserve my experience, or that they’re a monument to the past me, or that they’re a diary entry in a Zoot Suit. A poem is a vessel, and the purpose of a vessel is not to preserve what it carries unchanged. It’s meant to carry something beyond where it began.

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