10. Poet’s Choice: ‚The Solipsist‘ by Troy Jollimore

A friend of mine once observed that a lot of my poems — really, a surprising number — are about the head, or the skull, or the brain. So perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually write a poem about a solipsist: a person who thinks that he is the only person in existence and that everything else, the entire world, is just his experience, with no independent reality of its own.

I make my living teaching philosophy, but I’m always wary of putting philosophy explicitly into my poems. Randall Jarrell once warned that „poetry is a bad medium for philosophy,“ and, indeed, it’s very hard to write a good poem that is also philosophically interesting. But in „The Solipsist,“ I let myself try it — partly because solipsism is not a position I hold. In fact, the way the poem is supposed to work is that by the time you get to the end, you realize how utterly absurd and ridiculous the position is. / Washington Post 2.8.