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I wrote my first (and very short) poem in a decade! https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/poem-for-my-father

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Apr 22, 2023·edited Apr 22, 2023Liked by Alison Acheson

I suppose like many I’m of two (or more) minds about the role of knowledge in writing. For example, it’s hard to imagine writing decent parody or satire or pastiche without being immersed in and knowledgeable of the language and style of what you’re mocking or mimicking. For example, want to write a modern-day “Ulysses”? Kind of have to be familiar with Tennyson’s.

Similarly, if you’ve ever had personal knowledge or experience of some event or person written up in a newspaper or magazine, you’ve probably experienced the weird feeling of disconnect between what you know and what the journalist thinks they know (or even the weirder feeling that what you thought you knew was wrong).

But at the same time, you don’t want the surfacing of that knowledge to make you sound like the big shot, the smartest person in the room. For many of us, that’s an affront to the way we were raised (and all praise to our parents for that — my mother’s phrase: “Self-praise stinks”). The Southern U.S. expression “Don’t get above your raisin’” also comes to mind here.

One solution would be to present your knowledge in a humorous or self-mocking tone, as in Mark Twain’s Roughing It and other books.

Another solution, I suppose, is to adopt a voice that matches the material. I’m thinking here of Joan Didion’s 1966 magazine piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” with its forceful statements and declarative sentences, yet with something of the crime reporter to the writing, perhaps what we would now call “true crime.” I believe she wrote somewhere that she came to this voice via Hemingway, which is to say via a fictional voice. That is, we don’t see the countless hours of research, the notebooks, the interview recordings and transcripts.

https://www.therivetermagazine.com/some-dreamers-of-the-golden-dream/

And then there’s the voice of modesty, or at least what sounds like that. For example, one of my favorite poems is this one by Miller Williams (musician Lucinda’s father, if you’re keeping track), where he creates the “simple” voice of an old museum curator, yet basically tells an incredible and detailed history in the process:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47104/the-curator

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