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My theory of poetry
Sunday, April 11, 2004I had this idea last night, while I was trying to go to sleep. I almost got right up to blog this, but I was just getting warm, and I didn't want to go through all the fuss and noise. To write poetry you need to know where you are in life. Poetry requires roots...it requires a place to plant things to tether the emotions, the images, something that you can hook everything from so that it stays coherent, it stays poem shaped. You can't afford the extra luggage of context to explain where you are. You have to already be there. I don't know where I am. So I can't write poetry, I can't express the things I need to when I don't really know what they are. Then, I think, short stories might be the medium for finding where we are. What we are. They're perfect, because they're short...you can back off before it becomes too painful, you can attack the problem from different angles, different perspectives. So what are novels, then? I think novels are what we want to be. You spend a long, long time with a novel, much longer than anyone else. You need to live in a world that is better than reality, where the destination is what you desire, not what has to be. Permalink Cindy scribed this at 11:28 AM 0 comments |