It wasn’t until college that I realized that my words often conveyed more than I said, that my poems could betray me with meanings deeper and darker than I intended. I’d turned in a poem to an undergraduate poetry workshop and my professor dissected it in front of the class. The poem was titled “O” and it was about my mother being a telephone operator in the days when you could still talk to a person when you hit the 0 button on your phone. He explained that the poem wasn’t really about my mother. It was about the literary howl, and the enduring torment of other voices. I don’t have the poem anymore. I wish I did. It doesn’t matter. The poem, even in its disappearance, taught me a deeper lesson. Emily Dickinson’s best writing advice is this: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” The youthful poet I was then took cold comfort in Emily Dickinson’s writing advice. After all, the slant only counts if you intended it. The whole situation instilled in me a kind of terror and thrill in what I could write without even knowing it, what I could say. I wanted to have full … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s Writing Advice