“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

                                                                                                — Leonard Cohen

Storytellers are emotional exhibitionists. Across genres and throughout time, poets and playwrights, comics and satirists, essayists, novelists and literary journalists have at least one thing in common—they willingly shed their socially acceptable personas and put their psyches on display.

Human life is funny, profound, absurd, tragic, harsh and fantastic in every pocket on earth where it’s managed to take hold. Could you ever reduce your day-to-day experience to a specific genre or a single tone? We’re all large. We all contain multitudes.

And at times, we’re dull. At times, we contain platitudes. Which is why I try to live first, trusting that the stories will follow, hoping it will all make sense when I sit down to write.

Naked Poetics is a collection of personal essays by Matthew MacIntosh. It updates every Sunday at 11 pm GMT (3 pm Pacific/6 pm Eastern).