What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
There’s something about answering these questions that feels intensely personal to me, and private—they feel impossible to answer and also I kind of don’t want to. This is probably part of why I’m more drawn to fiction: a character can be like a telephone pole I’m hiding behind, which is easy because I’m tall and thin.
What’s most difficult about writing poetry for me is that I don’t really ever feel like I’m writing poetry. I don’t think I do, to be honest. When I set out, I’m writing a short story or a novel or a novella, whatever, and I shake loose from that form. I know we’re more flexible on genre these days, and in some way it’s a boring topic, we can use words like “hybrid” and so on, but I do think there’s such a thing as a short story and a poem and that they’re different: they take different shapes, have different ways to go about reading and writing them, and that’s interesting to me and worth holding on to. However, often the texts I write—though I imagine them to be fiction and I work within and through certain fictional constraints—aren’t quite fiction enough, we might say, or someone might say, or a journal might take them in their poetry pile rather than their fiction pile. “Poetry” can be a big bucket where we toss in writing we’re not sure what to call, and that’s generous of poetry, it’s kind of nice! But it also makes me feel a little guilty, or sick to my stomach, like I’m cheating. This feeling will probably change, will probably lighten, tomorrow or a year from now—I admit that it’s and I’m mutable (and so’s art).
No comments:
Post a Comment