Thursday 14 March 2019

Siân Griffiths : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

There’s not much about poetry that isn’t difficult, which honestly is part of what draws me to it. I grew up in Southern California, and I used to love watching skaters working on tricks. Skaters have reputations as being slackers, but I didn’t see that. Instead, I saw people who were always trying to do the next hardest thing because the next hard thing is the cool thing and who didn’t want to be cooler? I feel that same way about writing: if you do things you know you can pull off, it’s boring. Boring isn’t worth spending time on. You have to reach and do the things that are tricky to pull off because that’s where things get interesting.

I feel like I’m dodging a little though, so I’ll be more specific: as someone who spends a lot of her time writing prose, I will admit that I find line breaks baffling. I spend way more time that I would like to admit trying to figure out how any one poem should arrange itself on the page. I stare at the way published work break their lines, too, and try alternatives in my head, trying to figure out why the poet landed on the ones they chose.

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