exceprt of a post I made in a poetry community

[novapsyche]

I wrote rap lyrics before I ever wrote a poem. So before I began fiddling with words academically, I had access to concepts like syncopation and internal rhyme. And surprise. Rap in the mid- to late eighties was all about one-upping someone (which I didn't like) or fooling the listener as to where the rhyme would end up next. I stopped rapping because I realized early on that I couldn't make up things on the fly--too shy, not witty enough.

When I started writing poetry, I don't know who I may have come across. In high school I gravitated to strong voices. Plath's "Daddy" had a profound impact on me insofar as I understood, and continued to be utterly floored by, the rhyme she put in the reader's face as well as the import of her subject matter. She understood the musicality of words. But I didn't seek out her poems; I just enjoyed what I came across in high school. "The Road Not Taken" also hit me, but that may be because my 10th grade English teacher made all of her students memorize it.

My first true influences I can identify are Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. The confessional drew me in and gave me permission to write about subjects I didn't know could be poetic. I loved Sexton's playfulness and seriousness about sonics, and Olds' ability to lay everything out for the reader inspired me to be as risky as she was, to say the things she did. This was about the time I was in college.

After college, my major influence has been Wallace Stevens, for his determination to force his words onto the page. He deliberately pushed the limits concerning informal rules about repetition and rhyme. He wrote nonsensical poems that feel like poems because of the way they sound. His poems did what Dickinson said poems should: took the roof off the top of my head. His poems exposed the inner workings of poetry for me, and his prose about poetics was liberating and eyeopening. (I heartily encourage everyone to read The Necessary Angel, if you haven't already. Or even if you have.)

My goal in writing poetry? To keep honing my skills. Poetry is like a sword that can just keep getting sharper and sharper.

Comments

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I sometimes feel kind of weird and conflicted about poetry. I know you LOVE it, and I admire your passion.

But though I enjoy good poetry, I don't seek it out the way you do. (I won't even go into how much bad poetry there is on the net, people who write badly-rhymed doggerel and think they're geniuses.)

I'm even more conflicted about writing it. I think I write poetry pretty well when I put an effort into it. I think I occasionally turn out a poem that's stunning and exceptional (Ego? Me?). But it's not something I hunger to do. It's not where my passion lies. My passion lies in writing prose, particularly short stories. It feels easier to have closure on a poem, to write a perfect poem and tweak it in a couple of days, whereas writing a short story might take a week, revising it two more weeks, and it still won't match the level of perfection that I can achieve in a smaller poem.

It feels odd to feel kind of "eh" about something I can do well and to be so passionate about something I have a much harder time doing well. But maybe that's in line with other areas of my life where I always want to pursue the thing that's hard to get and take for granted the thing that isn't.

Just to be clear: I don't think writing a dazzling poem is easy. But I do think that you can achieve a higher level of perfection in a short poem in a shorter amount of time than you can with a short story or a novel.