What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
When you love poetry, you quickly realize that a poem, by nature, demands to be heard, felt, but first and foremost: interpreted. Poetry is perhaps the most concentrated, hermetic, and intense, of all literary genres. Out of context, a given word can mean a variety of things, and even in context sometimes, it can have at once more than one, or even more than two meanings. This is precisely what Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik was trying to express at the end of a poem called “La palabra que sana” in El infierno musical: “[…] cada palabra dice lo que dice y además más y otra cosa” or, in Yvette Siegert’s translation, “each word says what it says – and beyond that, something more and something else.” Because meaning is complex in poetry, because it is never straightforward, a poem needs to be interpreted. It will inevitably generate more than one possible reading, produced consecutively or simultaneously. Language is intrinsically polysemic, and this is precisely what poetry taps into. I don’t think any other genre can afford to embrace ambiguity this freely.
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