What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms
can’t?
For me, poetry is
about density and compression and, as a form, I think the its greatest
accomplishments have to do with moving away from the woolly excess of prose and
the sentence as a unit of thought towards the line as the structural unit, and
within the line, an ungrammatical freedom that owes far less to immediate
semantic sense. Personally, I am drawn to poetry because it has a great deal of
tolerance for juxtaposition and repetition: poetry fuses words together, then
evolves those fusings by grafting them to the other components of other lines,
stanzas, poems. It’s not to say that this can’t be done in prose, but I think
it is more difficult and not as innate to the form.
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