The Special Poetry Month Edition

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Several years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.

Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed Thelonious Monk, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, Sonic Youth, something.

Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice:

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

So, in honor of National Poetry Month, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.

Mood: Many poems are almost incantations or prayers in the way they use techniques such as repetition and alliteration to establish an atmosphere. Of the fiction writers who best use such techniques, I think most immediately of William Faulkner (who started out as a poet, and no, there’s no relation) and Toni Morrison.

Mystery: In general, poetry is more focused on nuance, on the elusive gaps of life rather than on the objective connections that much prose is dedicated to. It’s easy for a prose writer to write toward linkages instead of writing toward the interludes where a different kind of tension resides.

Personification: Poetry gives life to inanimate objects in a way that fiction all too often doesn’t. Animating objects is a good exercise for any writer.

Detail: Poets delight in specificity—in fact, you might say some poems’ narrative tension is formed around the drama of minutiae, forcing the reader to parse phrases as if reading with a microscope. As a writer who lacks Nabokov’s obsession with detail, poetry helps me pause and notice.

Sensory engagement: Poems are so often awash in sensory details, and details captured by all five senses, not just sight, which so many writers (including me!) can privilege. I cherish a good dose of synesthesia.

Brevity: Poetry is a craft of compression. Poems don’t have many pages to make a point, so their narratives tend to move through fragments rather than exposition. I love reading Kay Ryan’s miniatures or Basho’s haikus. Brevity inspires suspense.

Intensity: I think poems usually hit higher pitches than most prose, so fiction writers can benefit by studying how such intensity is created. I think of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath. What words, line breaks, rhythms, etc., produced a poem’s steeped moment? How can such intensity be captured in prose?

Exploration: I’ve never heard of a poet who uses an outline. I imagine poets to be more like jazz musicians, who wend their way through riffs to create, taking risks in their word choice and line breaks, and conceiving in the moment. Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara write as if following their pen on a playful romp.

The art of play: Poetry, especially free verse, can be more playful than prose, which finds itself hemmed in by paragraphs and sentence structure. If you want outright surreal wackiness—to the point that every word in a poem surprises—check out Dean Young’s Elegy on a Toy Piano (the title tells it all).

Attention to language: It’s a cliché to say that poets paint with words, but they do. Poets strive to write against cliché—scrutinizing and challenging each word—and perhaps even creating new words, a la E. E. Cummings.

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Because this is the line of poetry I think of most often

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Or is it? Read the poem.

Because a quote about poetry

“Poetry is life distilled.”

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Because poetry is photography

Even when you’re driving down a lonely Nevada highway.

Because the simplest poem made me understand poetry

I read this as a 17-year-old, and I don’t think I truly knew what a poem was before then.

The poem offers just a moment of perception, yet that moment contains so much. The apparition of the faces gives a sense of liveliness, a world in motion, brightness in a dark subway station. The faces and the petals are conjoined, as if residing in the gauzy textures of an Impressionist painting. There’s a delicacy to all, the images so mysterious and moody that they would risk being ruined by a single word more.

Pound wrote, “The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.” This poem goes far beyond the words in it.

Because a poem’s boundaries spawn beauty

Sylvia Plath called poetry a “tyrannical discipline” for the tightness of its boundaries: “You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”

But it’s the tyranny of the discipline that brings out the creativity. Think of different poetic forms, whether it’s a sonnet, a villanelle, or a haiku. These “boxes” make the creative act more difficult, yet the requirements of a form force the writer to look beyond obvious associations and consider different words that fit into the rhyming or iambic scheme.

Imaginative leaps don’t necessarily happen by thinking “outside the box” as the popular saying goes, but within the box.

Because poetry speaks to what lies beyond knowing

The poet Jane Hirshfield describes “poetry’s fertility” as the “marriage of said and unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the known world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing.”

The threshold that white space provides is fundamentally a paradox: We enter and leave with the same step.

Because nothing is sometimes poetry

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it.”

~ John Cage

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Because poems can become stories and vice versa

The noted flash fiction author Meg Pokrass actually started writing flash by taking her unpublished poems, removing the line breaks, and converting them into stories.

“Often, only minor changes needed to be made. Sometimes, a bit more had to be written. I leaned toward narrative poetry, so clearly this was easier for me than for other kinds of poets. In many ways I feel that with a bit of creative editing, the two forms become interchangeable.”

Because blurriness

To go more deeply into the blurry terrain of prose vs. poetry, consider Leesa Cross-Smith’s story (or is it a poem?), which reads, in its entirety:

“Not how it hurts when you press down on a yellowish-blue, purple-black bruise, but the feeling you get when you lift up. Let go.”

When I first read that story, I thought about it all day, as if trying to solve a Zen koan. It’s just a moment, but it’s oh so much more. I see a character grappling with complicated desire. I see a character pushing the boundaries of life in pursuit of meaning and grace. I see how pleasure is never just pleasure.

Sure, it could be a poem that’s not all that different from Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” but it’s a story with character change and plot escalation, at least for me, enhanced by that quizzical “Let go.”

Because a poem is best to describe the line between prose and poetry

Howard Nemerov explains this nuanced distinction of the difference between prose and poetry best in his poem, “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose And Poetry.”

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned into pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Nemerov could have written about how prose and poetry capture “a moment that you couldn’t tell” in an essay, but he’s writing about the way poetry speaks to mystery, showing how even moments that might be explained scientifically still need to be seen through the lens of enigma.

Because a poem can be just one word

You decide if Adam Saroyan’s infamous one-word poem from 1965, printed in the middle of a blank page, is a poem:

lighght

The “word” implies light. The plainness of the word light is no longer so plain, though. It poses a riddle. It begs the question of how to pronounce it, if it’s a typo, or what its intent is.

Saroyan was influenced by the Dadaists and the poet Robert Creely. He was also interested in “concrete” poetry, which focused on the arrangement and presentation of words as much as their meaning.

He says the word becomes sculptural with the extra “gh”, which allows the ineffability of light to become a more tangible thing. But the presentation of “light” in this case extends its meaning because of its brevity and isolation.

“Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant,” said Saroyan. “What you’re left with is more sensation than thought. The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity.”

Because poetry and music

Walter Pater said that poetry aspires to the condition of music.

I want everything to aspire to the condition of music. I want our politics, our economics, our lovemaking, our worship, our dishwashing, our grocery shopping, our tax calculating all to be a song.

Because we need to express vacuity

The great haiku poet Bashō said, “The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.”

Because confession

This is one of my favorite episodes of Write-minded. Kim Addonizio, one of my favorite poets, talks about the nature of her “confessional” writing and how a poet uses confession as a storytelling technique.

All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

If you like this newsletter, please consider checking out my recently released collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide.

Lidia Yuknavitch said:

“Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure.” 

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He’s the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.