Poetry for Prose Writers
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.
A grab bag of thoughts on poetry for 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.
