Everyone seems to say that poetry should be personal, that it is primarily a format to expand of the fullness of your emotional or psychic interior, but what does it mean when all the poetry you're good at writing isn't that. When poetry is more about storytelling or thinking about things unrelated to you or just about the words your mind makes when it decides it wants to, then about yourself?
this is a really interesting question with a bunch of moving parts! the short version is that i think all poetry has an interiority to it, and that the subject of the poem does not need to expose that interiority explicitly to the cold outside air.
i think that no matter what story you are telling — no matter what you are communicating, at all, ever, in almost every non-corporate context and then some — you are saying something about yourself. you are saying that you enjoy the way certain words feel in order on your tongue, behind your teeth, in your ears or mind. you are saying that you think about certain things, that stories follow a certain arc, simply that you like to write and want to write enough that you sat down and did it.
(you, specifically, have followed me long enough on here and on twitter to get a sense of the ways i communicate as a person. every tweet i make, my cadence and the vocabulary i have — that all tells people a lot about me, i think. how i think. how i share myself with the world.)
i think poetry is often portrayed, especially in younger or queerer circles, as a vent outlet — as the medium you go to when you have feelings too big for full sentences, more or less. and maybe that's what you mean! but the thing about poetry that anchors it to reflection or emotion is that it is a form which is about being willing to feel, as the reader. to be presented with something that is not communication in the other ways we're used to it — coherent stories and missives arrayed as grammatically correct sequential sentences — and to have the structure and sense of it come into being in our hearts as we look at it, or as we excise it from ourselves.
many, many poems move me not because they are autobiographical excisions of personal grief or joy or trauma, but because of what they tell me about my own emotions. here's a random assortment which are ostensibly about things unrelated to their authors, or which tell tales, and which move me not despite this but because of it:
Is it cruelty? by Rebecca Hawkes
[Kills bugs dead.] by Harryette Mullen
Let's not build a film museum by Zoe Higgins
the entirety of essa may ranapiri's Echidna but here's one poem by them: Hine-nui-te-pō & the Dominant Species
i could go on and on but i'll actually answer your question, as far as i understand it! what does it mean to write poetry about things that aren't the inside of your mind?
it means you're a poet! everything and anything is within the scope of poetry, within the scope of your wandering mind thinking: this is something i want to bottle, this is something wonderful, this is something that just is and i am writing it down. and that's the music of it, the joy and splendour of it — discovering a new poet's voice, and seeing something through their eyes that i'd never seen before. and feeling something move in me, too.
