I divide autobiographical poems into two classes for simplicity’s sake:  confessional and personal.  Not all autobiographical poems are emotional nor are all emotional poems autobiographical, nor are all personal poems “confessional” and vice versa.  But successful examples of all these permutations share a common thread:  credible emotion. 

Here is a rude division of poets for you to sample with this possible distinction in mind: 

Confessional:  Dorianne Laux, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath 

Personal:  Theodore Roethke, Billy Collins, Mark Strand 

The main difference between “personal” and “confessional,” as I see it, is the subject matter.  The true confessionalist has no taboos.  Anne Sexton broke ground in her day by writing about mental illness, alcoholism, menstruation and so on.   In many ways one could say Anne Sexton’s life was her art, though subsequent investigation reveals fictions in her confessions, but we’ll leave it to her psychiatrists.  Sylvia Plath, as well, wrote from painful personal experience but due to her highly metaphoric language, it is not always readily apparent.  Due in part to their renown and accessibility, I will not excerpt here. 

Emotion is not far removed from perception.  Emotion colors all perceptions and it is felt at a “rawer” level than sheer sensory data.

A poem can make you feel anything or fall completely flat.  The poet’s task is to pull you into her experience so skillfully that you feel what she feels.  To do this well, one must leave room for the imagination of the reader, and the emotional reverberation one’s diction has set up and “get out while the getting’s good.” 

The single most common error I see in beginning poets is not knowing when to stop.  The reader doesn’t want us to connect all the dots.  Avoid it.  Sometimes the writer won’t see the mistake until a third or fourth draft.  Feedback from the knowledgeable can often help you earlier. 

I want to say a brief word about inspiration and emotion.  I would find it impossible to write if I didn’t care about my subject.  If I don’t care, how in the world can I expect my reader to?  Then there is the error of caring too much, which leads to bathos.  Overall, for most of us, better to say too little than too much.  The audience for poetry is pretty smart.  Better to risk obscurity than risk boredom or insulting their intelligence, I should think.  Be cautious of any tendency to moralize, explain, or “sum up” your poem.  By doing so, more often than not, you rob the reader of experiencing the full impact of your art. 

Again, with regard to inspiration, what you know is safest.  If you cannot do justice to, say, feelings about the war in Iraq or  Afghanistan, write about things you do feel.  Better to write about tomato plants that didn’t ripen or your spouse’s peccadilloes than attempt a general, unconvincing statement about things you haven’t felt deeply.  As long as it’s at least important to you, it is unlikely you will render it trivial for the reader. 

Carolyn Forche, below, assays a highly charged scene:  a prisoner on the eve of his death. 

      The Visitor (El Salvador 1979) 

      In Spanish he whispers there is no time left.
      It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,
      the ache of some field song in Salvador.
      The wind along the prison, cautious
      as Francisco’s hands on the inside, touching 

      the walls as he walks, it is his wife’s breath
      slipping into his cell each night while he
      imagines his hand to be hers.  It is a small country. 

      There is nothing one man will not do to another. 

      --Carolyn Forche 

Forche employs very few details to sweep us into this tragedy.  She lets the reader complete the loop.  The visitor is, of course, the condemned man’s wife—who never actually visits except through images in the prisoner’s mind, briefly outlined.  Imagine how much less moving this poem would be if the author had listed many of the atrocities committed in El Salvador.  By choosing a few details and discarding others, she concentrates the universal in her particular, using the single preposition ‘to’ to imply so much in the last line.  She achieves the echo of “Do unto others…,” among other implications. 

Here is another example of a highly charged scene wryly handled by Robert Frost from his poem “Death of a Hired Hand.” 

      …”Warren, she said, “he has come home to die:
     You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.” 

      “Home,” he mocked gently. 
     “Yes, what else but home? 

      It all depends on what you mean by home.
      Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
      than was the hound that came a stranger to us
      out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.” 

      “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
      they have to take you in…” 

Personification is another good device for eliciting reader identification.  Here's an excerpt from Theodore Roethke's "The Meadow
Mouse."

But this morning the shoe-box on the back porch is empty.
     Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
     my thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?
     To run under the hawk’s wing,
     under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
     to live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat. 

The single trope of “thumb of a child” captures the vulnerability of and aching loss for a seemingly helpless creature without committing, perhaps, the pathetic fallacy of over-humanization, as in a Disney cartoon. 

On a personal note,  I will describe how I go about writing an autobiographical poem, and I like to think a poet is more an actor assuming roles from past experience than one who uses paper as a psychiatrist’s couch. 

Normally, I don’t know ahead of time what I’ll write but am in the habit of meditating, simply close my eyes and try to get in touch with an experience:  the time Aunt Sally made me sit for four hours over a plate of scallops I wouldn’t eat, my first date, the list is endless.  When I’ve honed in on a subject, I begin fleshing it out in memory—sights, sounds, and so on.  Next comes the most difficult part to explain:  choosing the words which will convey the emotional aspect of my experience.  I think it important not to be overly concerned with your readers while writing these special poems.  This will only make you self-conscious and prevent you from writing your strongest work.   

I find committing my experience to paper a cleansing one and often it pays dividends unforeseen.  And as for confessional poetry, note my idea about assuming characters from my past.  I am not just my subject; I must become my subject.