Lee Ann Roripaugh : part three

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

I feel like poetry is perhaps the most fluid of forms, the one most capable of shapeshifting, of transformation, and by extension I think that poems are also the form that is most capable of being aesthetically, emotionally, psychologically, culturally transformative. I think that any site of flux has the potentially to be a liminal space—a space of mystery, dismantling, and transgression. And so I think that poems frequently serve as small sites of mystery, dismantling, and transgression. Along similar lines, poetry tends to be the form in which language can function most explicitly as art, in which the aesthetic properties of language can be deliberately highlighted or deliberately played down, and in which the materiality of language is most often revealed, and as such the idea of language as transparent, or as communicative tool, or as a site of political or systemic neutrality is challenged. But I also think that poetry asks of the reader/audience to participate as an intellectual, artistic, emotional and psychological collaborator, and so the relationship between poet and reader/audience is never passive, or one-dimensional, and so powerful and unique relationships can be created between the poet, the poem, and the reader/audience.