The poem you write isn't supposed to be about you

Wednesday 9/17/25

The poem you write isn't supposed to be about you. Nor the song. The story. The book.

It's supposed to be about other people. The more people who can see themselves in the work, the better. The more who can find a better way as a result, the better again.

The poem that is about you, or the song, the story, the book, is instead like an entry in a journal in which a person communicates with themselves. Which is a perfectly fine and potentially valuable undertaking; one that can help a person in essential regards. But that's for them, within the proverbial four walls of their bedroom; it's not on account of the world and others.

Even the memoir that is about your life can't be about you. Not really. Not ultimately. Not essentially. The closer something is to being about everyone, the greater it is. Nor do I mean broadly about everyone, the way a "Good morning" post on social media applies equally to whomever sees it (in wan theory).

I mean such that each person experiences that work and feels as if it's communicating to them personally, directly, at the level of who they are and the level of who they did not previously know themselves to be. You may write about the specifics of your life, your days that no one else has had. But it still can't just be about you. Or primarily about you. Not for art.

It's plain to me that very few people understand this. If Bob Dylan's song is just about Bob Dylan, on this day of his life, when a relationship with this given person ended, and you need to know who she was, that's not a great Bob Dylan song. I'm not saying that's his writerly wont. I'm simply using the name as a theoretical example insofar as people tend to talk about Dylan songs.

What I am saying, though, is if it's 200 years from now, and you needed to know the biographical minutiae of an artist's life for their work to have its impact, that's not good, because that's not very feasible.

You can't count on people, as time goes along, reaching back, and back, and further back, with what they in turn find there--allowing that they make this effort, which often feels prodigious if it's considered as a potential thing to do at all--then having the same meaning in the space within time in which they exist, as it did before.

Thus, these things fade, even if they're sought out, which is highly unlikely. The biographical details. Art must never. And for that to be the case, it can't just be about you. Or, when you think about it, about you at all, save that you're a human and you are in there as well, as with someone you'll never meet, though you may still know them all the same as who they are.

You have to. Not in fact, but in truth.