What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I quite like the built-in expectation that poetry has to be arcane and obscure to succeed; that it’s seemingly telegraphed from Mars. I realize that this understanding has been challenged by poets before, but I think the reputation as an outlier form—something only the cognoscenti are disposed to understand—prevails for better or for worse. Richard Hell said, and here I’m paraphrasing, that “poetry is as rarefied and specialized as polo or astronomy.” This may be couched in the idea that poetry is about maximizing redundancy in language, whereas day-to-day discourse seeks to reduce it. I like that conceit a lot, and have attempted to incorporate it in my writing—it’s a challenge to render superfluity, or maybe it’d be better to say garrulousness in my case, as a virtue. When you have a lot of people down on a form, or at minimum unversed in its workings, it can be a really fertile ground for experimentation and exciting innovations in the arts. Poetry in my lifetime has certainly never been viewed as a populist medium of expression, and I don’t see that changing, even with the voguish explosion of Instagram poetry. This indifference outside of the academy can be a prison, and it can breed pomposity and hostility in its practitioners, but I’m more optimistic in thinking that it is one of poetry’s strongest qualities—this ability to endure against all odds and maintain its fortitude in the face of aesthetic pursuits that are culturally dominant.
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