Writing Problems: Attachment and Detachment in Craft

This post was suggested by Lynn Emanuel. If you have a suggestion for an essay please let me know in the comments!

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Earlier in March I wrote about attachment and how a poem is a relationship. In this essay, I want to think about how degrees of attachment and detachment operate on the page, in the poet's work. How do poets create a sense of attachment or detachment in their work? What are the craft ways that this can be done intentionally in a poem? 

Attachment in a poem means a deliberate attention to a relationship between the poet and the reader. Sending out poems into the arms of a reader, cultivating a readership, or engaging a real person at the receiving end of your poem is a process similar to initiating or sustaining any interpersonal attachment. 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Two Monkeys,” 1562, oil on oak panel

A cultivation of passionate syntax, wearing one’s heart on a sleeve, an urgent sense of the author as authoritative, and psychic proximity between the speaker and the subject are the markers of attachment in a poem. The advantages of attachment in a poem are: vulnerability, directness, sensitivity, and sincerity. Too much of this though can be deleterious: sentimentality, which is the death-knell for any poem.