A.W. French : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Finishing a poem is always tough for me. I have so many halves of poems in my notebooks, it’s crazy. I feel like my inspiration usually comes in the form of a line or two, and then I’m left to draw the rest out on my own. It’s that drawing-out process that has been tripping me up lately, but every now and then I can get into a rhythm and produce more than just a line or two that is really inspired by the experience I’m trying to capture in my writing. I think it’s also difficult for me to call any of my poems ‘finished’, since they come from my life and are always susceptible to change as a result of that origin. Maybe if I have a book out in the world some day, my poems will feel more concrete and unchangeable, but I can’t say that there’s much that I’ve published so far that I would consider “finished.”

I also struggle with cliché. I think a lot of first drafts of mine are filled with super cliché lines mostly because I try to write in the language I know and use, and those clichés express a multitude of things quite well. My work is the most fun to create, and I think is at its best, when its playing with common turns of phrase and subverting expectations. That’s a tough thing to achieve, and I don’t think my work does it as well as a lot of other writers, but I like to play with colloquial phrases in my titles especially. I’d like to work more on this, though, because working in my own vocabulary often results in the emergence of cliché.