The poems I return to most are the ones that made me uncomfortable the first time I read them. Not uncomfortable as in offensive or gratuitous, but uncomfortable as in: this says something that wasn't supposed to be said. Something that the social contract usually asks us to leave in the silence where we each keep our own version of it.
"The best poems say what everyone knows and no one says. That is not a small thing."
The Unspeakable Is Not the Unsayable
There's a difference between things that can't be said and things we've agreed not to say. Most of what poetry concerns itself with belongs to the second category — grief that makes others uncomfortable, anger that isn't proportionate, love that should have been extinguished by now, ambivalence that doesn't resolve. These are speakable. They're just socially inconvenient.
Poetry has always been the form that holds what prose struggles with — the associative, the fragmented, the emotional logic that precedes rational logic. A poem can say I still miss you and mean three different things at once, and all three are true. That's not imprecision. That's a more accurate representation of how feeling works.
Write toward what you've been told to leave alone. The poem that frightens you a little is the one worth finishing.
