Essay vs. Poetry: A little insight into what I’m trying to do here …



A friend of mine and I were sharing our enthusiasm about dogs, after sending her one of my recent pooch poems. She suggested this:

“I think you should scrap the structure of poetry for this one and approach it as an essay. You have a lot to say and I think you could say more. Just a thought …”

A tempting suggesting, for sure, since I love the essay form. Nevertheless, I declined. This was my explanation, and in it I think I’ve explained a lot of what I’m trying to do in my poetry. Because I think that my most successful poems probably seem very simple: small words, uncomplicated ideas. Deceptively simple, since this is actually a lot harder for me than big words and lots of dependent clauses.

Anyway, I thought I’d paste parts of 2 emails into this blog. I suspect that anyone interested enough to read my poetry (anyone out there?!!) would probably find this worth reading as well.



“But in terms of essay vs. poem, I think I'd better stick with what I do. The thing is, the essay is my natural form. I'm most comfortable with -- and good at -- critical thinking and clear systematic expression. So for me, the creative challenge of poetry is the artificial limitation that is its essence: its need for compression, its inherent musicality.

Attempting poetry gets me out of my habit of rigid disciplined thinking, forces me to be less comprehensive, a little more vague and allusive. It makes me focus down on what's truly important and affecting. It makes me say it once, and that means saying it in absolutely the best way possible. While in the classically elegant essay, you say what you're going to say, say it, and then say what you said: no ambiguity allowed.

And poetry also forces me to trust the reader, rather than taking her by the hand, spoon-feeding her (choose your own metaphor!)

The essay is an argument, an exercise in persuasion. On the other hand, the poem is a delicate balance between content and the aesthetics of sound and language, of rhythm and rhyme. (Which is why I never write political or activist poems. I'd love to trash Harper. I'd love to advocate for the environment and sensible values and sustainable economics. But you can't do those things very well in poetry. Not good poetry, anyway.)

The essay is rarefied and intellectual. It requires active processing. While the poem is visceral and emotional: I want it to enter into consciousness as music does, with a minimum of processing and analysis. Fundamentally, I'm far more head than heart. So writing poetry forces me to go into uncomfortable and difficult places.

Which means that poems are harder for me than essays (and letters, after all, are really mini-essays). But it's this difficulty that, when it's well done, makes a poem so much more gratifying. ...All in all, poetry forces a hopelessly prolix writer such as myself to make do with a lot fewer words!!!!”



“ … That whole thing about the essay vs. the poem can be simplified into the difference between saying something (essay) and showing it (poem). The thing about showing it is that the reader is invited in, does the work, creates his/her own images and associations, fills in the blanks. So for the writer, it's where the artfulness comes in; and for the reader, it makes poetry that much more powerful, evocative, and memorable. Which is also why everyone experiences the same poem differently; and why re-visiting a poem can be like reading something brand new.”