Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
My ideas around what poetry actually is, have undergone constant, sweeping change since I began to write. It’s been a sort of evolutionary process. When you’re very young, poetry is nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Even into high school, you’re still learning that poetry is traditionally about rhyme and metre. There are rules to follow and there’s some comfort and familiarity in that.
As I read, learn, and develop my craft over time, my definition of poetry gets broader. I find a lot of joy in poets whose work breaks the rules in interesting ways, whether it’s a poem that might be indistinguishable from a very short story or one that is only about sound instead of meaning. I’ve become very interested in the places where poetry blends with other media (like visual art, animation, music), and in experimenting with form and what a poem can look like. In the most recent issue of PRISM International, I found a poem by Charity E. Yoro called “Our Lady of ‘Iolani,” which was written as a crossword puzzle. It was brilliant and beautiful.
As a poet, you study the rules, experiment with them, and then begin to break them in artful ways. Poetry has become a difficult creature for me to define and I think that leaves a lot of room to make incredible art.
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