Reality in poetry

[Todd]

I always try to convince people that what I write is real because the speaker in the poem believes it all to be real. The problem I have with dark topics (like I had in NaPM) in poetry is the same I have in fiction, the villain doesn't believe they're the villain. They believe they're the hero, and I don't tend to want to go into that space too often to come up with a defense for things that are mostly indefensible. The I in my poem is almost never me (or to milo's point who I identify as me) but there is always some connection point that makes the writing feel right. Like in your example Ray, you could just take the feelings you have toward an adult and overlay them on a child to make the writing seem real. I don't prefer to do that exercise so it would constrain my treatment if any on that subject and a variety of others. I always think of writing as introducing something new to the world and there are some things I'll let others introduce. We had one poet on another site that wrote things like you mention. When you didn't like his work you were accused of censoring his creative expression. Even if the creative expression came across as nothing more than shock value.