What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I’m not actually sure that there’s a form that can’t capture the same things a poem can. But, a poem’s mission is different from other forms. Anne Carson said, “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.” I think that metaphor captures the essence of poetry’s “otherness.” It’s more often allowed to be tangential, microscopic, or verbose, than a short story, piece of flash fiction, or a novel or play. If those forms try to do what poetry often does (say, capture the meaning in a seemingly meaningless or ephemeral moment) we often think of those works as “avant-garde.” For a poem, that’s just another day at the office.
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