Going where prose can't go
by Tabitha Dial
The Metropolitan
(Photo by Steven Stoner- The Metropolitan)
Poetry West president Jane Wampler reads several selections from her poetry on Wednesday, April 21 in Tivoli Room 440 as part of the Denver Poetry Festival's activities.
Jane Wampler, president of the Colorado Springs-based organization, Poetry West, and winner of a Poets & Writers Exchange Award and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship participated in the Denver Poetry Festival by reading her poetry at the Tivoli on Wednesday, April 21. The following are excerpts from an interview for The Metropolitan.
"It might be easier to say what a poem is not (than what it is). It is not prose chopped into lines. It's not song lyrics. It's not the re-telling of a moment in fancy language. It's not a diary entry. To quote Emily Dickinson, 'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.'
"I've written short stories, hard news, magazine features, public relations copy, teaching manuals; you name it. But poetry has captured my heart and my intellect. It's the most playful and rigorous art form that I know. It asks so much of you as a writer.
"It asks that you be willing to let go of assumptions about what you think you need to say, it asks that you follow an internal music or a rhythm that may supersede your understanding of the poem's destination; it asks that you drag the unknown into the known."
"We need to remember, as Frost would say, what it would impoverish us to forget. And that's why there is poetry.
"(To be a poet) means that you are forever struggling to find paying work. There's no money in poetry because it does not have the commercial potential of novel-writing. However, it's poetry-not short stories-that a nation turns to in times of crisis. Perhaps that's some consolation."
Can anyone appreciate the art, or is it just for academics, critics, poets and the relatives and friends who love them enough to read them?
"Poetry is only difficult for people to read because it goes where prose can't go. It goes into the regions of consciousness that can't be paraphrased. Anyone who trusts their imaginative associations can enjoy a poem. If you're reading something that's abstract, full of philosophical pretension and obscure allusion, just remember, you're probably not dense-it's just a bad poem.
"The advice I can give to all young poets is to read contemporary poetry. Get your nose out of the "Norton Anthology of British Literature." Leave the inverted syntax and the stilted diction to the dead white guys.
"This is your time and your language. Write from the rhythms of your life, your language and your generation. And the best way to learn what the possibilities are is to read what your contemporaries in the latest journals are writing." |
