Prose vs. Poetry
When it comes to poetry, I don't know what I'm doing. And I love it.
From third grade, when I started a diary, I have been writing prose. I’ve come to poetry late, and unsteadily, but sometimes poetry feels like what’s called for.
Prose is my favorite sweater. I am comfortable with all facets of it, character development, pacing, world-building, the shape of the narrative arc. I know what I want to write about and even where I hope to end up, so I dive in. Revision is necessary part of my freewheeling process, but I enjoy the nitpicking retracing of my steps that make the end result better.
When I’m writing a poem, I do it on instinct. Generally, my poems spring from a feeling or memory. I don’t even know myself what significance the feeling or memory I am trying to evoke has, so the poem becomes the uncovering process. Since I’m not out to prove a point and there’s no narrative to string me along, as poet Theodore Roethke put it, I learn by going.
You would think it would be easier to write something anarchic that doesn’t have to be developed logically or punctuated properly, but it’s not. A poem has a way of living in my head both before and during the writing of it that I find unsettling. It’s like the persistent buzz of a florescent light, this rattling around; a circular fixation. I am trying to convey something exactly and perfectly, and am somehow convinced the exact, perfect words exist. The other day I wrote and stared at the words “rip open” for an hour before deleting them. That’s crazy-making.
Still, I am drawn to the challenge of poetry, which requires distillation, as opposed to the expansion and clarification prose demands. I am insecure about what I come up with, but when I actually do get some word or phrase in a poem “right” it feels like a more profound “right” than happens with prose.
Good poetry is arguably worth waking up at four a.m. with the word “begin” in my head, so insistent that I have to get up and grope my way through the dark to my laptop to replace the word “start.”
A poet has the power to make up the rules, create a universe, and this supreme oversight might seem freeing, but me being me, I want to people to recognize some part of themselves in what I write, while using the most precise, beautiful language I can. It ain’t easy.
Writing prose, my words felt like a familiar, serene lake; a trusted element I could dive into headlong. Poetry, while the same element, is a whitewater river.
I mean, I know water. I know how to swim. But currents take figuring out, and I’m still wary. But that’s okay. I love the not-knowing, the awareness that I am in over my head, that I still have so much to learn.