The Ladies’ Handy Book

Don’t tell how he held the gun so tenderly

in your throat as he made you call him Lord.

~Excerpt from “Don’t Write a Poem about Rape” by Julie Buffaloe-Yoder. Read the rest here.

This struck me because, obviously, I write on some similar topics, and they are really things that really for-reals occurred, in real life. Really.

So, once I had a poetry teacher tell me to stop writing poems about things that actually happened. I tend to write all my poems about real things, describing actual events, except for two instances (”Since Alison Died” and that one poem I wrote for the 3 x 3 word game.) When he said that, it made me mad that someone should think the truth wasn’t important, or worse, wasn’t poetic enough.

The truth is always more poetic than some crap a community college dude with bad facial hair and an earring made up out of his head. And if you can’t make it poetic, then maybe you should stop writing poetry. It would be like an art instructor telling a student not to paint landscapes, or maybe to just slap a big inflatable clown in the middle of it! For artistic interest!

Nature is beautiful, or is cruel, or is intricate, or is interesting in some way, all on its own. So is the truth. It just is. It beats the shit out of anything I, or anyone else, could possibly make up. What’s up to the artist is to select the little pockets of fascination out of the reams of perfectly ordinary days, years and minutes, and then to find the best angle.

Anyhow, yes. In my view, editors are the gatekeepers of the status-quo. Don’t write a poem about the truth, certainly not if the truth is that you were raped. No one wants to hear that shit; it’s icky girl stuff.