07-14-2016, 05:03 AM
You don't have to lie or make things up -- you just have to allow people to look at your pictures from different angles. The more you try to make your reader see things exactly "as they were", the less likely it is that they will engage, simply because they may never have seen even a nearly identical situation in the same way as you.
Metaphor and symbolism are beautiful things. They allow the reader to project his/her experience onto a poem without actually affecting the way that you intended it. That's what sets poetry apart from neatly-lined prose. I would be willing to bet that very few people who read my poems ever know which are from an actual experience of mine and which are entirely imagined -- and I like it that way.
Metaphor and symbolism are beautiful things. They allow the reader to project his/her experience onto a poem without actually affecting the way that you intended it. That's what sets poetry apart from neatly-lined prose. I would be willing to bet that very few people who read my poems ever know which are from an actual experience of mine and which are entirely imagined -- and I like it that way.
It could be worse