Darrell Epp : part four

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

Poetry can slow down time. It’s obvious that we are obsessed with speed. We want what we want, when we want it—we don’t want to hear there’s a delay. No matter how fat we get, we still want our food FAST. We want faster downloads, faster satisfaction. We want our pizza in 30 minutes or it had better be free. But it’s getting hard to ignore that, in our ever-faster race to the finish line, some things are being neglected and lost along the way…Reading a poem can provide a shocking reminder of what we have lost. In cinema, the ratio of narrated time to time of narration is 1:1. This means, it takes as long for you to watch the cowboy say “Let’s go that way” as it takes him to say it. This is part of what makes cinema so popular and thrilling, that immediacy, that headlong rush of time. It is also what makes cinema pretty lousy at delivering moments of transcendence, or spiritual truth, all exceptions, such as the films of Robert Bresson, duly noted. On the other hand, in a poem the ratio between narrated time and time of narration can be wildly skewed, until time dilates, and, if you’re lucky, stops. Simply put, you write a poem about a moment. You reader spends more than a moment reading it, more moments re-reading it, digesting it, pondering it, until this one moment that would otherwise have vanished, grows in stature and becomes powerful enough to haunt. Read or write enough poems, and a powerful message is sent. The message is: all these moments that make up the ligaments of your day, don’t let them flow past you without paying attention, they are worth savouring, giving thanks for, and being baffled by…