Thursday 5 December 2019

A.W. French : part five

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Most of what I appreciate about poetry is its depth-in-brevity, the sense in which a poem can communicate so much in such a short space. That being said, I love a good long poem as well. Poetry is also, at least in a contemporary sense, not necessarily bound by the rules of language. When somebody writes prose, they are writing in the same way that prose has been written before – one word after the other, all in a line, so on and so forth… but when I write a poem, I can break all of that if I want to. There’s a space for those fractures of form and there’s a space for more conventional poems, depending on what you want to do. I guess the various options you have as a poet just excites me, and I want to keep trying new things.

I also feel poetry to be more meditative than other forms for some reason. There’s something about it that lets me dwell on things in a healthy way, and that’s just helpful for me as a person, regardless of the quality of what I produce. I’ve written myself through a lot of difficult times in my life, and I’m sure there will be more to come. I can’t imagine doing the writing that I have about the tougher subjects I’ve faced in any other form, for me it has had to be poems. I love writing poetry, and as much as I’m sure I’ll try other forms down the road, this will always be home.

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