What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
In poetry, you can be unrelenting. You can hold the reader’s breath for a full page and build and dismantle tension with precise grace. It allows for hairpin turns and pivots, lets you (and the reader’s eye) turn away from something that is hard to see and turn back a line later.
As a patient, when interacting with the medical system, you have to learn the words your doctors will hear best. You’re stuck using their pain scales and the names of recognizable symptoms. In poetry, you can use your own language to render experiences comprehensible and make the reader feel, or at least imagine for a moment, the sometimes unbearable sensations of the body in pain. You can write the fiction of your body. The metaphor doesn’t have to be medically accurate, it just needs to evoke the feeling. If medicine fogs the order things happened in, it doesn’t matter. It can be someone else’s body, and in writing it so you can sometimes write it more clearly.
No comments:
Post a Comment