What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
For me, one of the challenges of writing poetry is that a poet needs to use language in a way that’s counterintuitive. Outside of art, in a non-literary context, people use words to dispel ambiguity, to articulate opinions, to explain abstract ideas, and to summarize. Even when we’re children, much of our language education trains us to do these things. But poems are successful only if they appeal to the reader’s imagination, so a poet usually needs to resist the urge to summarize, and often needs to withhold judgment, especially if that judgment would reduce a poem’s range of implication or would come in place of the raw sensory data that helps readers imagine whatever is being described. That’s why students in creative writing workshops are always being told to avoid abstractions: to show, not tell.
At the same time, the most skillful poets do find ways to use the full resources of their language, including abstractions such as “soul,” “heavens,” and “world”: all three of those words appear in Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” but the context around them (“Then Space - began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell”) makes them strange and vivid. John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” defies almost every workshop maxim that exists, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing.
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