Stories are told, people go on journeys
by CarolineI lent a beloved book of poetry, Velocities by Stephen Dobyns, to my mom, who’s a voracious and openminded reader. She described his poems as “densely packed with free spiritedness.” I revisited a favorite Dobyns essay, Deceptions, and here’s a little piece of it:
A poem invites the reader into its room; with the novel the reader walks around the fence surrounding the house. With a poem one often creates a single experience, with the novel a body of experience. With a poem the connection with the reader is more physical. Because of the noise of the poem, its rhythms and music, because of the intensity of its emotion, the connection with the reader can feel more intimate.
But if I feel hostile toward the world and dislike its people, I can’t write poetry–there is nothing I wish to say to that reader on the other side of the page except Go Away. For me, writing a poem is to engage with the world; writing a novel is to escape from its immediacy. W. H. Auden claimed that people write novels because they have no lives of their own. Novelists, of course, deny this. While I deny it as well, I also feel that when I am writing a novel, I am stepping out of my life to enter another, while in poetry I am intensifying my life.
“The noise of the poem, its rhythms and music”!
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