Posted by sulynn in poetry, writing process | 0 comments

Why I write poetry

As someone who does write (occasionally) poetry as well as (even more occasionally) fiction, I thought I’d continue with Steph’s likening of poetry and fiction to two different languages. Say, like French and Catalan. Similar but distinct. Speak one and you have a better chance of speaking the other.

What does it take to speak a different language? A few things, most of them involving effort (she says, remembering Greek noun declensions with a shudder). The first requirement, though, is exposure.

I started reading poetry when I was about ten, when I discovered a yellowing copy of Palgrave’s in my school library and enjoyed it so much that I photocopied the entire volume. (I think I was particularly drawn to Wendy Cope.) So I’ve always taken it for granted that poetry was there to be read. Admittedly when I was that age I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on, from Shakespeare to devotional tracts to the proverbial backs of cereal boxes.

I like reading poetry a great deal. I like it as much as I like reading fiction, and far more than I like writing poetry, much to my frustration when I attend workshops. I’d much rather gush to fellow students about how amazing Hart Crane is than practice outputting lines in dactylic tetrameter.

But back to metaphors of bilingualism. Most bilinguals have a dominant language, and that language for me is fiction. This has great advantages – I can plot! I can worldbuild! Some of the time I can come up with entities with names and characteristics and motivation attached to them that other people identify as characters! (It also has certain disadvantages, such as when I submit a bunch of sonnets for critique and people ask, “Are you sure this qualifies as imagery? Because it looks about as linguistically exciting as white-out.”)

Ironically, I probably like writing poems more than I like writing stories, because I spend so much less time on poems and I write them only when I want to. There is really no reason to write a poem except to make yourself happy – there’s no money in it, nobody reads it, and so you might as well write about the subjects that make you happy, in the style that makes you happy.

I write poems to satisfy my word-hunger when I don’t have a character nagging me to tell her story, which is sadly often these days. And sometimes I write poems to replace my failed stories – this piece was written after repeated unsuccessful attempts to generate a plot about the old woman who lived in a shoe. So, in counterpoint to what Steph said, fiction does often beget the act of poetry for me – it happened all through 2003, when I was producing stories that were simply not very good and failing to finish stories in general and despairing of my ability to plot. (I wish John Scalzi had been around to tell young writers that they sucked, back then. It would have liberated me a great deal.) Back then, I stripped down the half-formed story ideas I had and transmuted them into poetic form.

Nowadays I can finish my stories, but for some reason I still scribble poems as a sort of therapeutic exercise anyway. My lack of focus bothers me somewhat. But Steph can tell you more about that someday.

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