For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.