poetry and the poet - what makes writing effective?

This evening I had a great discussion with a fellow Professor in my department about writing about experience, whether as fiction or non-fiction. What makes it work; when is it painful and embarrassing to read? We both know of instances of former colleagues who have written stories - some humorous, some mocking, some vitriolic - that are only thinly disguised from their original context, and their effectiveness seems to be more the gasp of recognition that the author has dared to inscribe a real story than it is the razor sharp pang of recognition of everyone's story.

I think writing successfully from experience requires an element of distance from the experience itself. I don't mean that one doesn't feel it any more. But if the feelings run too deep the writing can be clouded by a fog of personal stuff. My question always to myself: am I writing this because I have never found the space to deal with it? Or am I writing it because it's resolved within myself and I now retain something from experience that will write out as good writing, not as therapy?

It's a principle, I think, that works for preaching as well as for writing. The passion of anger and personal hurt always puts the focus on the author - and now and then that "works" if the story is memorable, historic, worth the attention. But a writer of longevity needs to harness the passion that delivers a prophetic message, the deftness of a moving story, the lightness of touch that converts acute observation into laugh-out-loud humour - not losing the ability to feel, but able to discipline the feelings until they are the servants of good writing.

Coleridge wrote about this dynamic in his Lectures on Shakespeare. He distinguishes between the poem, and the poet. The Song of Deborah (which appears in the Old Testament) is an in-the-moment overflow of passion that he identifies as "pure poetry" - but that doesn't make Deborah a poet. Shakespeare, on the other hand, works with multiple characters, giving first this one, and then that one, the words to articulate different passions, humours, experiences, personalities. He converts observation and experience into characters that many readers and listeners identify with, and it is that ability and that discipline that makes him a poet.

Any of us might deliver a one-time brilliant poem, if the circumstances of passion and triumph line up. We can only hope. But if we want be writers, we have to go the harder route and process the feelings, the observations, the experiences, and become poets.