To write poetry—and by poetry, I mean the thing that stabs the soul within an inch of its life, holds it up by the bare threads of its shirt and says, “Listen, you son of a gun” (the contents of which are entirely subject to each individual and will most likely look strikingly different from father to daughter, friend to foe, and so on)—you need authenticity.

Authenticity is the taproot of every poem. It’s as integral to the life of a poem as mycorrhizal fungi are to a plant by supplying the nutrients it needs to survive. Suppose a poet supplies authenticity within a poem; they are not only supplying the chance for that authenticity to take root within a reader but also nourishing the soil within themselves.

Lack of authenticity has contributed to what I call a whole lot of ‘yappage’, which is—by my definition—the art of speaking for the sake of being heard.

Heard, not listened to. This is a fundamental distinction in the discussion of yappage and authenticity within poetry.                               

Say, for example, that the yappage at hand is a pile of dirty laundry. Now within this pile of dirty laundry is one clean shirt that just so happened to get tossed into the dirty pile. This clean shirt is your authenticity. This clean shirt is the one thing that will make or break that job interview you have later today, or that date you are anxious to go on. The only issue now is having to sort through the dirty clothes to find the clean shirt, but by the time you get to the clean shirt, it is almost indistinguishable from the others, having sat in their musk for god knows how long.

But as a poet, you must persist. This is where your greatest gift comes in: your ability to create something that will resonate with people on multiple levels.

Be daring. Take the risk and play with the language, syntax, and form to help portray the budding feeling within.

Being authentic as a poet means writing an embarrassingly large pile of dirty laundry poems.

Describe mildewy towels that need to be washed; a bacteria breeding ground like college spring breakers. Tell a tale about the band-tee you borrowed from a stranger (who was overly drunk and overly generous, most likely with ulterior motives that you dodged swiftly) after you spilled a drink on yourself, never to be returned to its owner.  

Try not to feel bombarded by the stinking, sopping yappage that may try to contaminate and infiltrate every authentic space you create. It’s especially easy to feel this way with social media and the insatiable need it has created for everything to be rapidly consumable; word-vomit on legs, pseudo-intellectual aesthetics.

It can be so easy to write poems that have a lot of surface-level aesthetic qualities to them. These poems tend to dabble in the art of abstract, which leaves the flesh of the work tantalizing yet thin. We want meaty, fleshy, and exuberant poems that satiate the writer and the reader. Once you have that meat, tenderize it. Take a flame to it and draw the juice out from your abstract ideas: strong metaphors, fresh language, grounded ideas, and imagery. You will find by doing so that your authenticity was there all along; it simply needed to be disturbed and dug up like a spring bulb. 

Ground yourself. Feel the fungi between your roots and let your authenticity flow.