Kathleen McCoy : part two

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

I love this question because I actually think about it a good bit. While I enjoy all forms of creative writing and art in general, poetry is to literature what music is to the performing arts--a sacred space, a language of its own, a touchstone, a portal. Poetry is the first place I go for consolation and the one place I work out my own voice, my way of saying something true, something that's both grounded and, well, transcendent in the sense that it starts with the banal, the fractal, the quotidian, and spirals down and up again to a kind of song that enlarges the perspective. At least, that's my aim; it's what I find the poems do that inspire me most. That's what Seamus Heaney does in "Digging," when an image of his father digging potatoes finds analogy in the poet's pen which is then compared to a gun. It's also what Audre Lorde does shockingly well in her little-known poem "The Women of Dan Dance with Their Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors" ("I come as a woman/dark and open . . . .") 

Literature in general can tell the truth "but tell it slant," as Dickinson wrote, but it's poetry that springs from oral tradition, from music, from storytelling, and from history/herstory. The rhythm, the images, the finely wrought phrases make earworms and mud pies to delight the senses and haunt the memory.

Poetry has to speak to the spirit in content and in form, however trifling the subject may be. I remind my students that this is the difference between subject and theme, that you can write about absolutely anything, but what you say will be larger, greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, this can be said of a novel or story or play or song as well. However, in poetry, the theme and the form are so intricately interwoven, so compacted, so layered that it can make more memorable music. In that way, poetry is the most intimate guest. It comes for just a minute but its presence remains for many years like pleasant scent that just will not dissipate.