What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry is intimate, vulnerable, and shameless. It can take a form, or it can reject it altogether. Journalism has to present facts, comedy has to tell a joke, but poetry can do all of that while capturing the breadth of the emotional moment. A poem doesn’t have to stop at facts or the punch-line: a poem can tell the whole story. It preserves emotional memory in ways that the other forms don’t. It can be simultaneously depressed, beautiful, and funny, like the true human experience. It can tell the whole story or just part of it. There’s a responsibility to the reader and the people who populate the poems, but it’s also easier to preserve anonymity of the people discussed in a poem, too, because the character’s identities are less important than their reactions and actions in the world.
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