I always sputter that the songs aren’t a diary, a blog or a therapy session. I’ve never had a fact-checker come in to go over my lyrics. I haven’t worked through all my childhood issues and achieved enlightenment through songwriting. I can write whatever I want, and I’m the only one who knows what is indeed fact (or at least my version of fact…you see the problem?) and what is poetic license.
Conversely, where am I supposed to get inspiration, if not from my own life? Television? (Yes, I can have it both ways: “Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.” — Oscar Wilde).
Yes, a resounding yes! I shout as this hits home for a poet. Certainly poems (often) rise out of the personal experience, but in the process of making a poem out of the experience, the poet strives for something greater than the truth of the moment; she is seeking the Truth. The root of poetry is poiesis, which means "to make." The experience (or image or whatever) on the page can never be exactly like it was in Real Life. Our hope, then, as poets, must be to make the poem as good as it can be, to be accountable to the poem's deep Truth.
Not to say this is always easy for me. Sometimes I will cling to a detail that is not quite working in the poem but that feels important to me. That's when it's helpful to have trusted readers, readers who want the work to be its best, as well as time because time creates distance and distance helps with objectivity. I find it's also important to ask myself why I cannot let go of that detail. Maybe it belongs in the poem but hasn't been said in just the right way yet. Simply slashing through a poem is a dangerous method of revision. I'm not opposed to cutting as long as I understand why I'm doing so. Or maybe I am hanging onto the detail because of the experience in Real Life and not the experience in the poem. Regardless, I should be able to justify every element, every choice I've made, in a poem.
Cash's entry winds around to other related topics and is worth reading in its entirety.
