Poetry and Trauma

A fellow poet and friend made a comment last weekend at the book launch party of another mutual friend and poet.  He congratulated him for his talent and accomplishments as a poet despite not having experienced significant trauma in his life and lacking the creative fodder that such trauma would have otherwise provided.  Several people, including myself, chuckled at this assertion, but I’ve been mulling it over here and there in the past week.  I don’t believe that good poetry necessarily comes from suffering and trauma most of the time. 

Sure, it can provide interesting content and a certain drive to expression, which may be healing or cathartic for the poet.  However, poets who have experienced past trauma may be overly fixated on the trauma at the sacrifice of a diversity of other subject matter.  Furthermore, I often find that it predisposes the poet to a low-grade confessionalist style of writing which can look a bit more like a page ripped from a diary than literature.  Consciously, or unconsciously, the poet may be using (or abusing) their poetry as a way to share their pain, garner others’ pity, or simply shock their audience.  Some of this may be valid, but sometimes it crosses a line into wanting attention for the trauma itself, rather than whatever literary construction was derived from the trauma.  Another pitfall for the poet with a history of trauma is the tendency towards a negative worldview that colors everything they see.  If and when they do write poems about subjects beyond their trauma, they may repeatedly gravitate towards the dark and disturbing, or transform even a potentially neutral subject into something unnecessarily negative. 

For me, poets (and other artists) are the sages of the ages, the ones who interpret the world through thoughtful and creative analysis, teaching and illuminating, helping others to grow personally and spiritually without inflicting dogma.  We have all suffered in life, to greater or less extents, and our suffering can be part of what fuels our creative drive.  But when suffering has been the overwhelming theme of a poet’s life, or caused them to become actually psychologically unwell because of it, it can become a hindrance to their work.  We need to see the dark and disturbing, as it is part of life, but we also need the light and gentle to survive the harrowing night.  We need the poets who can find glory in the flower, the bird in flight, the sleeping child.  We need to the poets who can write an unregretful ode to their parents, teachers, friends, and lovers.  We need the poets who can find the world in a drop of water that is dew sparkling on morning grass rather than the tear falling perpetually from their eye.  I need them, for sure, to continually bring myself back to reality, to remind myself of the balance.