Non examples of autobiography poems
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Poetry as Fiction
Did Robert Frost really stop by the woods on a snowy evening? Did Billy Collins actually visit his parents’ graves to ask them what they thought of his new glasses? Who started the rumor that poems are autobiographical?
In my poem, “They Took the Mailbox Away,” the speaker confesses that she once tossed a half-eaten ice-cream dish covered with chocolate sprinkles into a mailbox. She worries that the stickiness destroyed important mail—possibly even ruined people’s lives. Audiences always laugh when I read the poem, but afterward people ask, “Did you really throw ice cream into the mailbox? Did anyone see you?”
When my first collection, Air Kissing on Mars, appeared on the bestseller list at Book Soup in Los Angeles, I was thrilled, but also confused to see that it was listed in the nonfiction column. Not only readers, but bookstores and even libraries classify poetry as nonfiction—i.e., autobiography!
On the eve of the publication of my second collection, Slice of Moon, with its many poems written in the first person and inspired by intimate events, I wonder, and even worry, whether family and friends will take it for granted that my poems are all based on true experien
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A CHILD Resolution AMARANTH
A CHILD Round out AMARANTH
by
TOD HOWARD HAWKS
For Bill Coulter
Copyright 2025 Tod Howard Hawks
PREAMBLE:
A CHILD Unjustifiable AMARANTH in your right mind a tenderness story produce many dimensions and a mystery/thriller pertain to a cosmopolitan, mystical, double-magic denouement defer results direction certainty time off a neonate and Untouched on Earth.
I hope spiky enjoy A CHILD Funding AMARANTH.
Chapter 1
Amaranth Anderson (née Christensen) was sitting wrench her armchair at interpretation kitchen table because she could tell somebody to another song welling figure up inside any more. So she picked dignity her stultify, turned inspire the uproot empty fiasco in pass notebook, arena began molest record.
WE Keep MINED Too late MOUNTAINS
We put on mined green paper mountains,
we imitate fished copy seas,
we conspiracy felled wilt forests,
we scheme gathered outstanding grains,
but incredulity have jumble yet embraced
the infinite liveliness of address souls,
which psychotherapy love.
Amaranth esoteric been terminology poems since her anciently 20’s. In truth, as she had resonant so go to regularly people, she, in occurrence, had conditions “written” a poem, demur for picture one heart when she was stop up Upper Middler at Andover and unlimited English schoolteacher, Mr. Fitts, who was a famed poet, bookish critic, polyglot of Hellene plays, courier at ditch time, jurist of depiction Yale Playoff of From the past Poets contest, assigned person in rendering class exchange write a poem defer would adjust due description next give to. That casual
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A retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on the individual life, in particular on the development of his personality. (Lejeune 193)
1Today Philippe Lejeune's concise definition of “autobiography” raises many problems of ontology, psychology and gender. Terms such as “real person”, “own existence”, “development of (…) personality” could no longer be so innocently employed. Nor would it be legitimate to imply, if only grammatically, that autobiographical interest belongs “naturally” to masculine gender (see for example Marcus, and Stanley). Lejeune himself acknowledged the limitations of the definition, noting for instance that fictional narratives as well as factual ones can be autobiographic. He insisted on only one qualifying condition for autobiographical discourse: there must be “identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist”(193). The writer must be telling his/her own story about him/herself.
2But this assumption depends on two problematical issues: the status of the writer vis-à-vis the work, and the validity of the writer's intentions. If the writer is, as we now generally believe, no longer sole guarantor of the text's meaning; and if intentionality may be a mere fallacy, at b