Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Oh yes absolutely. In particular in regard to prose poetry. I once thought prose poetry was a high-brow way of describing a paragraph of straight prose. But the more I read, the more I saw how lyrical the form can be while maintaining a solid foundation rather than mucking around with obscurity for obscurity’s sake. I think mostly of Lydia Davis’s work when considering this approach. Her “stories” could as well be “poems” if insight and authenticity count for anything, and both certainly should. Standing in direct opposition to this more relatable kind of poetry would be poems written by the likes of Wallace Stevens. I’m aware I’m on cusp of utter blasphemy saying so, but I can’t stand Stevens’s work. And it’s likely for the same reason Harold Bloom worshipped it; Stevens seemed to go out of his way to write poetry for some elite idea of other poet-readers, poets who, themselves, wrote poems for the others in turn, hoping to create their own kind of secret, exclusive language built to stroke one another’s bruised sense of self. Or there’s always the chance these poets were just more educated and more talented than me and I’m missing something. Who knows really?
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