John Luna : part two

2. What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Part of my interest in relating to poetry pertains to my own problems as a reader, and how a person should go about accessing ideas in writing. Poetry has often just seemed like the most efficient way to communicate a material sensibility in writing urgently, with a figural relationship to the structure of the writing (its syntax, its appearance on the page) that is direct and also directly reflexive. The problem of introducing characters is avoided, as is the problem of framing arguments, yet characters and arguments occur. We get close to the visual, to conventions of speech and even body language, as to conventions of rhetorical oratory like truism, epigram, etc., always with the ability to slip back into thought and the process of language’s just achieving coherence. Even the lyrical or the musical can fall back into silence or forward into traffic.