Kevin Prufer : part three

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

Here’s one:  There are so many kinds of silence available to poets that are unavailable to writers or prose or to painters or sculptors or even musicians.  We have the silence of the line break, of the stanza break.  The silence of white space.  Of the punctuated caesura and the unpunctuated caesura.  We have the vast silence that comes at the end of the poem.  These silences are so versatile and, well deployed (well arranged) contain within them a kind of music, patterns of silence.  Sometimes these silences suggest the dramatic pauses of a speaker who falters, looks for the right word, creates suspense or tension.  Sometimes they are the silences of a mind at work on a problem—moments where the mind rests in unarticulated thought before thought arrives at articulation and the words begin again.  I am increasingly fascinated by qualities of silence, the white page.