Martha and Emily have been mentioned in a whole host of my poems over the years. One of the earliest poems I still read in public from time to time, 'Chrysler', is about an incident where the speaker in the poem goes duck hunting with a friend and comes home to hang out with him and the girls; more broadly, the poem is about the jealousies and white lies that underlie some male friendships. Another poem, 'A Letter From Spidergate', is an extended observation of how memory become bent by time -- and by optimism, as the father in the poem desperately tries to pretend that his memory of the events described in the poem is the truth.

I've mentioned the girls so often in my work that a lot of people who've heard or read my poems feel that they know them. They'll come up to me after a reading and ask about them. And not infrequently, they become angry or upset when I tell them (and yes, I always tell them) 'that, in fact, in 'real life', I have no children. (I've never been duck hunting as an adult either'but that somehow seems to bug them less.)

While I can understand the confusion, I'm not sure that I've always completely understood where the anger comes from ' but I think it's worth talking about as an interesting sidelight on how people see the purpose of poetry, and the role of the poet, in today's world.

Super high-level overview: poetry in English has for most of its history included a wide range of topics and styles. It's never been unusual for poets to write historical narratives, commemorative poems, love poems, and political work; but at one time, it also wasn't unusual to find poems that were more like novels than what we are used to today. Poets had no problem using a poetic format to write narratives that we would today render in fictional prose.

In more recent years, however, there's been an increased emphasis on what is usually called 'confessional poetry'; this is work that highlights the inner life of the writer. Poets who write confessional poetry reveal a lot about the fears, traumas, and (occasionally) joys they find in life; the main thrust of much of this work has been a focus on emotion, especially emotional distress and even mental illness.

Confessional poets may or may not use realism or realistic imagery, but either way, much of the work is influenced by dreams and the work of digging up buried emotions; childhood and parenting issues, psychological traumas and crises, Freudian and Jungian metaphorical discussions, are all common elements of a lot of confessional poetry. The most well known poets in this genre are certainly Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; Robert Lowell and James Wright also figure into discussions of this type of work. And certainly, many of the poems that we hear at open mikes and slams are also at the very least, tinged with the scent of confession.

Since so many poems in this genre are constructed as first person accounts of potentially distressing personal issues, readers have come to expect that the person speaking in the poem is, in fact, the poet. I think that the average reader of confessional poetry is usually aware of an underlying convention that there is some more or less therapeutic aspect to such poetry; and that therefore, in the best sense of traditional therapy the poet is attempting to get at some specific truth about themselves through the work'and that therefore, the poet is doing their level best to provide factual information about actual events.

'Let it out', is the mantra here; 'tell the story of what happened, and so move past it.' And in that spirit, many poets ' especially those new to the craft ' simply live up to that credo, and empty facts about themselves onto paper, and then onto the stage. All that's just fine, as far as it goes'but it also leads to a curious phenomenon: the belief that the speaker in nearly every poem where it isn't explicitly stated otherwise is, by definition, the poet.

For many poets ' even some of the confessional ones ' nothing could be further from our actual practice. We may use characters to speak, or shift facts drawn from our own experiences, in an effort to create art that does something more than simply report our own experience -- we try to create avenues to universal truths that are informed by fact, but not necessarily bound by it. People expect us to tell 'the truth', and most of us do try to do that. But let a poet buck the literal interpretation of what that truth means, and that's where anger sometimes arises.

Songwriters get nailed with this one often. Think of rappers, for instance, who might have grown up middle class and bored in suburbia until they got their inner thug on'now, you'll see them maintaining that 'street cred' at all costs, and who could really blame them' And fiction writers, it should be said, rarely get hit with it. Imagine if we did do it to them. Tolkien would be thought to have no credibility unless he had actually fought orcs. (Weird shit, my precioussss')

Good rule of thumb: the speaker in a given poem is merely a character whose voice is being heard in that poem, unless you know otherwise because the poet told you so directly'and even then, don't be too sure.

Which leads us back to my 'daughters''I created Martha and Emily nearly twenty years ago, in the poem 'Chrysler' (included in the 'Poems' section of this website), as a way to step into the shoes of a friend of mine who was dealing with issues of being a new parent. I watched him struggle with the divide that was widening between his past life with all his single buddies and his new life with the girls, and I began to work out a poem on the subject; but every time I dug in, I found it too'simple; it was just too difficult for me to come up with something that seemed to capture the nuances of the gulf as it grew.

I took the crucial step one day when I decided to stop trying to write the poem from my own point of view, and try to write it from his. When I stepped into those shoes, I began to inhabit a new space on the topic; I began to see the number of half truths both of us were foisting upon each other as we attempted to figure out how to deal with these new realities.

As I worked on the poem, I realized it had grown far beyond a simple story of how two guys got along; it was about the secret worlds that men build around shared social fantasies of what 'being a man' is supposed to mean. I included images of 'macho' things like a Chrysler, a pick up truck, shotguns, cigarettes, and bravado (none of which, with the exception of the cigarettes, matched anything like what my life was like at the time).

The more I dug into the poem, the more I found I needed the two girls to provide a foil to the action; they show up twice in the piece at crucial times, as interruptions or brakes on the 'male bonding' that's going on in the piece.

As for the names 'Martha' and 'Emily' well, they were pretty uncommon names at the time. I chose to use them because they were (in the early 80s) considered old fashioned and somewhat plain; I thought they'd be solid names that carried little baggage for people. As the years have piled on since then, I have to confess that both Martha and Emily have continued to show up in my work. (Perhaps Freud would have something to say about that, but I'm not planning on asking.) The 'existence' of those two girls has become something of a touchstone for me ' a place to put my relationship and my interactions with my two nieces, for instance ' who didn't exist at the time the first poem was written, by the way. (Ok, now it's Jung's turn') I can't imagine my work without them, in a weird way.

So, the next time you hear poets telling you something apparently unspeakable about themselves'don't fret too much; remember that it could just be a good story. And consider this: if it is a good story, and you're buying it'doesn't that just make the poet better at what they do'

And for the poets out there: remember, it doesn't always have to be about you'