|
Poet Roundtable
1.
AOTW: Of the various forms of expression, why do you find poetry so appealing? What can you say in poetry that you can't say as well in prose?
Carol Muske-Dukes: Everything. You can say everything in poetry --- you can invent words, invent a syntax. This may be somewhat possible in experimental prose, but (to my mind) it is without the thrill.
Mark Ford: To answer the second part first, nothing! In fact these days poetry, American poetry anyway, very often is in prose, as David Lehman's collection of prose poems from Poe to the Present makes clear. In considering this question people often quote Shelley's assertion that the difference between poetry and prose is a vulgar error. We're always aware of the genre of whatever we're reading --- a newspaper article, an instruction manual, a cook book, a poem --- and all the expectations we bring to the genre are in play as we start reading. I guess for me poetry provides the fullest range of expectations to evoke, explore or confound.
Robin Robertson: Poetry has a density and music that, on the whole, prose lacks --- though there are, of course, some prose-writers that can make beautiful sentences. Rhythm to me is more important than making a point. What matters is the music, the weight and texture of the words, and the way they combine, sometimes, to make something new and beautiful. As Lowell said, I think: "poetry is not the record of an event; it is an event."
Daniel Mark Epstein: It is the music of poetry that distinguishes it from other forms of imaginative literature. I'm not sure there is anything that can be said in verse that cannot be expressed in an essay, drama or novel; yet there is no form that moves a reader so deeply as poetry, because it enters the soul of the reader not only as information but as music, encoded emotion.
|
