The “I” in Poetry

I’ve come to realize over the course of this workshop that I almost always write people (often indicated by the use of pronouns) into my poetry, and of those people, I almost always include a central voice or point of view, whether it be an “I or a “you” or both or more. Is this “I” me? The author? I’m not really sure. My knee-jerk response to that question was initially “No!” in protectiveness of both the poem and myself as entities entirely separate from one another, however the more that I contemplate this the less I’m sure. There are definitely times when I use poetry as a way to express my individual, specific voice, to record or interpret events from my own life, and to communicate things that I am unable to otherwise speak.

Upon a quick google search of “the I in poetry” I found that people are very opinionated on the subject of the “I,” which is often related to the evidently highly contested terrain of confessional or autobiographic poetry. Despite the various sides to the argument on whether or not poetry can be autobiographical, most everyone seems to agree on one thing: that there is always a difference between the “I” in a poem and the “I” of the author. One page from poets.org [This Article] actually offered a “Short Quiz to Tell if You’re a Confessional Poet,” and without even reading the quiz, I bristled at the implication that I’m any, single ‘type’ of poet.

Lately I’ve been finding myself leaving every workshop for which I’ve submitted a poem including an “I” (which, in retrospect, may have been every single workshop) wanting to move away from the “I”/”you” central voice in my writing, which leads me to believe that the “I” in my poetry is actually confounding some of what I am hoping to communicate. I think that one reason for this is that including an “I” encourages me to also include more characters in an attempt to create a full picture of what is surrounding the “I,” but without making the poem unfocused and clunky with a convoluted web of specific names and signifiers, the poem can become muddled and unclear when there are so many different characters and only two pronouns being used. Secondly, I think that the presence of this central ‘first-person-esque’ voice turns the focus around onto the “I” for both me as the writer and subsequently the reader, thusly overpowering the other ideas and images in the poem and bringing myself as author into question.

I think that part of the problems that we have been encountering with the “I” in poetry come from an attempt to understand poetry in terms of the “fiction” vs “non-fiction” binary. When I tried to come up with a good way to explain my feelings on where poetry fits into this system of classification, I couldn’t! Poetry to me does more than meld, it actually transcends fiction and non-fiction, and would be ill-served by either classification, one that implies a separation between reality (often determined in terms of tangibility and what is external) and possibility (thusly linked to the internal and intangible.) What do you guys think about the “I” in poetry and, in relation, where poetry sits on the “fiction” vs “non-fiction” scale?

-Christy Leigh Agrawal

4 Replies to “The “I” in Poetry”

  1. This is a funny blog post to me, because there is always an ‘I’ in every poem, unspoken. Even if there is an ‘I’ narrator in a poem, there’s still the over-arching, all-speaking ‘I’ of the poet. We can only write within the scope of our own experiences – be it the words we know or that are used frequently around us, our experience because of our gender, sex, sexuality, race, ability, etc, or our experience due to the people/perspectives we’ve met through our travels in the real and literary worlds. We must inherently put ourselves in every poem, in the syntax and poetry and white space. We are every word, every choice; the poet’s ‘I’ rings in every character. Even the content can be revealing ‘nonfiction’ – my obsession with science poetry being evidence for that.
    That being said, I think that people who argue one way or another for the inclusion of an ‘I’ are wasting breath. An I doesn’t make it inherently more nonfiction, because you can write through plenty of other narrators in your poetry. Every piece will always be somewhat nonfiction, at least in my opinion (sorry, fiction writers!) so go ahead and ‘I’ it up, or not! Either way, your poem will have as much, or as little, nonfiction in it as you want; but not because of the presence of an ‘I’. (I hope that makes sense)

  2. You know, this is really interesting.

    I always feel like I derive my poems from something that has happened to me personally in life. By no means do I describe my poetry as CNF though: it’s often quite the opposite. The few times I have tried to write a CNF poem has usually left me gasping for air, a fish out of water, with no friction to grab onto to push my piece forward.

    I like fiction. Fiction is definitely more my forte than poetry. I don’t know if my love for fiction is directly affecting my poetry (being that this is my first poetry workshop), but I often catch myself using characters that I have previously used in my fiction pieces. Do you guys do that? Where does the “I” become me? This should be a blog post. I’m going to post it.

  3. You made think about all the poems I have written and what I found out is that, just like you, I almost always write people into my poetry. I mean from just looking at the poems that I wrote for this class alone there has always been a person in them. Wow! I don’t think I have written a poem without a person in it! Thanks Christy, now I have to write a poem without a person in it. Anyway, what was I commenting about? Oh yes! The ‘I’ in poetry. Hmmmmmm, I guess from what I said above you could say that I’m kind of used to it. I realize now that the ‘I’ is like a safety net for me. And now I’m wondering if I can write a poem that doesn’t include an I, a he, a she, an it, a they, or a whatever.

    Thanks for helping me basically question my entire existence, Christy!

  4. Christy,
    I completely agree with how you feel trying to place poetry into the fiction vs. nonfiction binary, and that’s been a huge struggle for me, too. Using the “I” in poetry always makes me feel like I’m telling some sort of secret, and so I’ve been trying my best to stay away from using it. The “I,” for me, is akin to me speaking for someone else, even if that someone else is me, because the reader’s version of the “I” and my view of myself are often two very different things. I wish the idea of using the “I” in poetry were less difficult to parse, but I like where this process is taking me, thanks for the thought-provoking post!

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