In my search for poetry-as-memoir, I have encountered something I intuitively knew but hadn't quite articulated or had articulated for me:
Most poetry is memoir.
Highly autobiographical, with lyricism that can get at feeling over fact, poetry and memoir both prefer senses, experience and feeling. No wonder I like them both so much.
My favorite discovery so far is finding Mary Karr's poetry. I had no idea she wrote poetry.
And here's the best part - it's really fucking good. From the collection Sinners Welcome:
STILL MEMORY The dream was so deep
the bed came unroped from its moorings,
drifted upstream till it found my old notch
