There are no written or unwritten rules that demand that, as poets, we must in effect "out" ourselves and confess the source or inspiration for our work. There is no requirement that we tell our reader whether the work is autobiographical or fictional. Sure, if you want to, then fine; that is choice. So be it. But if, like me, you prefer to keep your source private while at the same time writing work that may seem, on the surface, incredibly and astoundingly confessional, remember and remind yourself that just because you appear to be writing work that shares a great part of yourself, does not in any way obligate you to confess to the reader the pure source of this work.

The source of your work may be the poet's personal experience and deep wells of hurt (or conversely, happiness, but in truth, few readers are interested in the source of your happiness. Most want to know whether or not the nasty stuff, the real nitty-gritty, the hurtful stuff is true.) or, it may be a source that is "stolen," the way poets often take another's experience or look at a painting and write a poem or a story based on what they believe is behind the poem.

One very talented poet that I know, a dear friend and a well-known poet of our time, once wrote an entire series of poems written from the point of view of various members of her early family from the nineteenth century, all of whom had commited suicide. This poet took so much license that she literally spoke for the dead, or channeled the dead. She dreamed up, or knew enough and then layered on, whole reasons for their suicide. She wrote of how the person felt at the moment of death. In short, she had, some would argue, stolen the other's experience and translated it through her own experience. In this way, she had layered something onto the actual events and here again, the true experience or the actual reality is passed through the poet who serves as a conduit, and, depending on the conduit, the resultant poem will vary. Her view of how the suicidal person felt at the time may be entirely different from what I would imagine they felt.

Does this make my friend a "liar"? I don't know. I don't think so. To me, it is what poets do and frankly, it ought to be what we do best. Our job is to take human experience, the great human emotions and the world around us, and present it to the rest of the world, to the reader, in a way that feels authentic. Our goal is to write poems that touch and move and astound and effect the reader so that they may see something of what we see. Another way of saying it, so that the reader can feel a certain empathy for the poet - feel the sadness of the poem, or the anger, the outrage, the betrayal, or the happiness, the whimsy, the sense of ease - all depending on the subject matter. But always, always our job as poets is to convince, to move, and to leave a lasting impression.