Are you a good judge of your poetry

[rowens]

The way I see it, I construct myself in poems that are autobiographical. The "I" is always a persona. And I often do construct feelings contrary to what I believe to be "my own", and actually experience them. For me, poetry is far deeper, and more vast an area than what just goes on paper. I guess the easiest way to say it here is that I take Shelley's "legislators of the world" painfully seriously, and literally. I prefer lyric poems to dramatic ones. Though I do like fiction, and the creation of characters. I like to write fiction, and with poems I'm more prone to use the first-person "I" than I am in stories or novels. There's a lot you can learn from yourself, whether you're using the "I", or conjuring other characters. As much as I'd like to believe in Platonic forms, I don't take any reality for granted, and that gives me a lot of work to do when constructing realities for poems, or anything else.