What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I’m not sure poetry “accomplishes” anything because to me that implies completion, and I prefer to think of poetry as a practice of leaving breadcrumbs or string to give us clues as to what came before and what comes after, but with no fixed destination. I live for that messy in medias res life, and ain’t sorry for it either 😉.
But I do think poetry does things other forms cannot, or does it differently. For me, poetry has a way of writing through the human experience without necessarily needing cohesion or precision—it is a way of suturing the gaps and absences of our individual and collective stories not to make them neatly whole, but to make their fragments and fissures sing, contrast, fugue.
And, because I tend to work with precarious, decaying materials, I feel that poetry teaches us to listen and to let things be as they are without the need to over-narrativize them or fit them into something we think they should be. Like, for me, I can just let a leaf or a thing speak with the other objects I bring it into encounter with—it doesn’t matter if I or we recognize the language produced or not, or whether it forms a human-centric logic, but that it exists, it is as it is. There’s something very humbling about that.
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