Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
I began writing poetry before I knew much about it. I wanted to write a kind of Romantic lyric because I had been reading Wordsworth and Keats and was attracted to their complex resolutions, their confidence in the existence of some complex truth that might be reached through nature and thought. I still see the value in that, but I’ve lately become much more interested in the way a poem might tell a story, might invent characters and follow them, how the defining quality of a narrative poem is not that it offers the reader a series of events, but that it manipulates the speed and quality of the passage of time. These days, poems have become a way that I can explore the world of the not-me, the world of other characters responding within time to unlikely circumstances.
No comments:
Post a Comment