I was talking to a poet, about truth value, and he was saying that the truth value of e.g. an advert is who made it and how it sells (I paraphrase from memory). I would be more inclined to think of it as audience based (what needs it generates in you), though I might still ask if some audience is truly privileged: and maybe that second moment is what is meant? Who is this for?
Maybe that’s what the failure of critical theory is all about: being for the connoisseur is the only truth that exists.
Personally, I’d think – and hope – my poems incorporate the rejection of closure, rather than an attitude against my own confessional narrative, but it’s a close call. I plump for the former hopefully not because I’m mad but because I’d hope that its ghosts are not mine.
I guess that’d be where the truth gets in: a sort of turning inside out – into autonomy – of poetry for yourself.
So maybe everyone starts out writing for themselves, and then stuff happens, they have an audience or somehow revolt against that in whatever way, and that’s why we do it.
I think if they stand up musically then I can say it’s both an attitude and a rejection of narrative closure.
Red
For awkward cleft in
diadem moon gleams. She
partakes in blooming earth
with roots in dew.
Romantic, but awkwardly so and therefore distinctively in voice, but there are many ways to write the same poem. So then shaping for energy (which makes sense):
Moon
Gleams in awkward cleft to
diadem partakes in dew loose
earth roots bloom.
I would add that truth content, being negative, is a criticism of whom the artwork is for.