“Memory is every poet’s ace because the richness of the material comes from yourself as you exist today, looking back at the person you once were.”
-dimitrireyespoet.com
You may ask yourself, “What am I going to write about?”
If you’ve asked yourself this question then you’ve already started the process of writing. There are two main ways to begin writing and they come from the speaker’s perspective.
The speaker is usually in fact the poet, but because poets can write about some pretty intense things they call it the speaker to create a distance. The speaker can also come in two forms: one is called the innerspeaker and the other is the outerspeaker.
Outerspeaker
The outerspeaker is the more general out the two voices. They can tackle anything from Queerness, political commentary, social commentary, political structures, social settings, race, culture, basically anything in the bigger sphere of what’s going on in the world around them. To unpack this a bit more. Let’s look at social and political commentary, this can include #BlackLivesMatter, #TransLivesMatter, Border control, or something that happened to you when you were walking down the street. What happens often is a lot of these will fall in the same gyre, because you can’t experience one thing without experiencing the other.
Innerspeaker
The innerspeaker is something else you can pull from and it provides an entirely different database. The innerspeaker becomes the looking glass of your eyes. Everything that happens to you, everything in your experience, is going to funnel out through you and into your poetry. The easiest thing you may find yourself talking about is your family and friends, which makes a lot of sense because those are people you’re sharing experiences with most often. From this point you can start expanding on how these people interconnect, how you interact with your mother, how your mother interacts with your father or how your friends interact with your family. This creates a cross section of compatibility and relationships that can pour out into your poems.
Talk About Where You Grew Up
Aside from family and friends, a conversation between poems in your work can happen if you decide to revisit where you grew up. The ways you navigate your neighborhood and the individuals that exist there are all good storytelling opportunities. There are a lot of poets that end up talking about their hometown, Richard Hugo for example, spoke about his hometown in a post modern contemporary form. This is something poets have done throughout the centuries.
Another poet in particular is Gretchen Marquette and her book May Day, which can be purchased on my Amazon booklist. A book that talks about many things, there are moments where the speaker mentions a brother in Afghanistan, which speaks both of the innerspeaker and outerspeaker (familial ties/ war) while the overall setting takes place in Minnesota, which paints the landscape with images of trees, hunting, fishing, deer, and mountains. (sorry for the super watered down review, Gretchen!)
Memory
The innerspeaker’s memory bank is the richest source of them all. Akin to revisiting your grew up, accessing your memory opens the floodgates to different situations, feelings, and settings. I turn to memory a lot because time is on my side, even when I am not writing about myself. It could have been 5, 10, or 15 years since I accessed certain experiences and in that time I have grown. I’ve been able to observe what was right, what was wrong, and I’ve had the mental space to develop a hindsight. Memory is every poet’s ace because the richness of the material comes from yourself as you exist today, looking back at the person you once were.
In short, when exploring your own poetic identity and voice, you should use both elements of the innerspeaker and outerspeaker. A voice isn’t a template you can buy at the bookstore or some online writer’s blog. It’s something that you develop over time, by writing a bunch of different poems, putting them together, and seeing what quilt you’ve created.
If you need some writing help, I do offer services on my website.
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