What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can stop time or create various simultaneities. I feel that one of the great gifts of poetry is that it is an open form of inquiry. It may include narrative, concrete images, epiphany, resolution—but it may not. So often, everything in popular culture assumes a conventional narrative patterning, but this differs from the way life really works. Many of our most important projects (art-making, loving, creating constellations of family or community, for example) are characterized by waxing and waning, by ad hoc patterning, by varying rhythms. Of course there’s a lot of great literature in fiction and nonfiction that can do this, but I tend to feel that innovation in other genres uses poetic patterning as its model. Poetry has almost infinite elasticity which makes it an incredibly responsive and resourceful art.
No comments:
Post a Comment