It’s time for a change. This week’s episode of That’s Not Me! comes from friend, author and poet, Tim Taylor.
That’s Not Me! examines how much of our fiction is autobiographical and why some authors try to insist there’s no link between their fictional characters and themselves.
Having said that, Tim is going to focus not on his fictional stories but on his poetry. Poetry can be purely fictional, but that’s quite rare. Right, Tim?
Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this very interesting blog series, Miriam. Though I do write fiction, today I’m going to talk primarily about poetry.
I think it’s true of most poets that they make full use of their own experience in their work. I certainly do this myself – when life presents you with something worthy of a poem, why would you not make the most of it? It is perhaps easier for poets, as opposed to fiction writers, to put themselves into their work, because a poem can be openly autobiographical in a way fiction cannot.
I know some poets whose work is almost exclusively inspired by their own experience – either by what happens to them personally, or by their reactions to things they encounter. However – while it’s had its moments – I must admit that I’ve never felt that my life is sufficiently intereresting to be the sole source of inspiration for my poetic output.
I think it helps here to be a fiction writer as well. Except for that minority whose novels are thinly-disguised autobiographies, fiction writers must rely heavily on imagination to create characters and situations. I often do this in poetry too. I’ve written many poems about purely imaginary people and situations, and I would say that my best poems include some of these, as well as ones written from life. Even here, though, poetry (and fiction) still draw upon personal experience in a more indirect way: imagination moulds new things out of the mixing bowl of memories we acquire throughout our lives.
A good thing about poetry is that it doesn’t have to be either one thing or the other. We can write poems directly inspired by our own lives, but improve them by omitting, adding or altering details – ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good poem’ is a maxim I often use! Conversely, we can use real experiences and real things to add colour to an otherwise invented poem.
I’ll end with an example. The scene described in the following poem is entirely fictional. Yet the poem does, of course, articulate thoughts of mine about the power of objects as reservoirs of memory. And the cowrie shell is real – I did indeed acquire it on a childhood holiday in the late 60s.
So is this me? You decide.
The Cowrie Shell
“Just chuck ’em in the skip,” she said
as if each object in that box
were not once part of me:
attached by long sinews of stories,
fed by flimsy arteries
through which a child’s heart
once pumped them full of meaning.
The box took them when life moved on.
Now lifeless, so I thought
but peeling back the cardboard
I could sense the gasps for air.
Each object in its turn cried out;
the child in me woke up
and would not let them go.
Among the marbles and the model cars
I found a cowrie shell: smooth, mottled,
exuding still the faintest smell of salt.
“You remember me,” it said
– that holiday in 1969”. I felt
a flickering of what seemed like recall.
I dug deep for that memory,
found it rotted by the years.
I steeled myself, obeyed
the pitiless reminder:
“you cannot keep them all.”
Not quite big enough to be an ornament,
if fitted better in a smaller hand.
I put it down: out fell a single grain of sand.
From LifeTimes (Maytree Press 2022). Signed copies are also available from the author: tim.e.taylor@talk21.com.
Tim Taylor has published two poetry collections, Sea Without a Shore, and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press, and two novels. His poems have won, or been shortlisted in, a number of competitions and appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform and various anthologies. Tim lives in Yorkshire, UK, and teaches Ethics part-time at Leeds University. He enjoys playing the guitar and walking up hills (not usually at the same time).
Miriam Drori, Author 