What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry is the queerest of all the artistic letters—at least more so than fiction or essay. On a formal level, poetry can assume whatever shape it deems vital to its intent: prose chunk, a list, reportage, documentary, instruction, spell—the possibilities are only limited to the practitioner’s imagination. This isn’t to say that fiction doesn’t do this kind of shapeshifting too. To be sure, one only needs to see: the shifts into lyric and verse in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved; Tommy Orange’s There There—with its percussive anaphora in the chapter on the drummer-character Thomas Frank or the essay-like prose of the “Prologue” and “Interlude” chapters; the play that one suddenly finds themselves in the middle of in Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men. No, my point is: where this shapeshifting is a necessity to the fabric of poetry, it isn’t necessary to how we experience fiction—although it is exhilarating when it happens there.
I’m also thinking about how some of my favorite poems handle words as objects. These are word-objects that have varying weight and textures, so that when they hit against each other, they create sound and music and other physical shapes. It’s the poet, for example, who notices the noun “duplicate” is a copy of the verb “duplicate”; or the way “parallel” contains parallel lines; or how “th” in the word “teeth” forces one’s tongue to be slightly bitten by their teeth. Unlike other artistic letters, the presence of word-objects is as vital to a poem’s success as any meaning or news that may be found on an informational level. At its best, poetry has the capability to engage the entire body, in a tangible way, when it is read.
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