The other day, a poet here tweeted about discovering something in a poem they were writing was scientifically disproven and that sounded to me like a writing prompt about fact and metaphor in a poem. (1/7) https://twitter.com/toddkaneko/status/1246427392895332353

I think a lot about how poems owe less to facts than they do to truth, as long as the contract with the reader is clear. For me, this is in great part how metaphor works. (2/7)

I think about how metaphor is sometimes a lie that reveals something true, something that isn’t immediately evident. Or to complete the kind of transformation that happens in a poem. (3/7)

This is in part why I think many people resist poetry: there is a distinct lack of literalness in poems, or at least a slipperiness of the kind of literal meaning we are taught to read for in school. For me, this slipperiness is often where the poem does it’s magic (4/7)

Facts and truths (metaphorical or not) aren’t mutually exclusive, but combined they can create tension in a poem that underlies topicality or physicality. I’m always a sucker for this in a poem. (5/7)

Like, Lamarckism was scientifically disproven (rejected?) a long time ago, but how might we disprove its disproof metaphorically? Or how might it’s falseness reveal something true about the world we live in? Or something else? (6/7)

For me, writing prompts come from my curiosity about the different ways a poem can potentially work. Also, my son is watching Pokémon again and I’m not interested in it right now. So I’m thinking about poems instead. (7/7)

Also, I deliberately didn’t tag that poet at the start of this thread because maybe they don’t want to be tagged into this. Trying for respect, not erasure here. (8/7)