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| Kim Addonizio |
Vice-Versa
Can you
have it both ways? Here, three author/poets discuss why prose writers should
try poetry, and why poets should pen prose.
By Michael J. Vaughn
First published in Writer’s Digest
First published in Writer’s Digest
As a career author/poet, I am
frequently the only novelist at the poetry reading, the only poet at the
fiction workshop. I find this puzzling, because the two disciplines are so
wonderfully complementary.
I suspect that this
separation of forms derives from an ancient and powerful prejudice. Poetry is
such a unique art that someone invented the word “prose” to mean, very
specifically, “not-poetry” (in the same way that “gentile” means “not Jewish”).
I think authors envision poets conjuring their weirdly shaped stanzas in
witches’ cauldrons, while poets imagine authors chained to enormous boulders of
narrative, inching them painfully forward.
Well, nonsense. Poetry and
prose are both expressions of written language, inextricably attached to that
thing we do when we open our mouths and sound comes out. And there are vast
benefits to be culled from the territories in which they overlap.
But don’t take my word for it.
Take the words of Diane Ackerman, Kim Addonizio and Naomi Shihab Nye, three of
today’s most successful author/poets, who agreed to help us explore the
advantages of being a “double threat.”
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| Diane Ackerman |
How would you compare the
creative processes of prose and poetry?
Ackerman: Among the many
kinds of nests writers create for the feathered mysteries that live inside
them, I find poems more like an arrangement of nesting stones, and prose more
like woven mud-and-twig nests. The architecture of each is slightly different,
and has its own rules, but both are good places to hatch ideas.
Nye: I would say they are
very close friends, next-door neighbors, a teaspoon of almond extract here, a
snip of fresh mint leaves there. They feed one another. They sit down together.
There is no clash. They never argue. I rarely “turn one into the other,”
however. A poem starts out as a poem, a prose as prose. It’s an instinct, I
think. Good friends know when it’s their turn to talk.
Addonizio: The image that
just came to mind is this: the bottom-feeding fish have swum up and started
leaping out of the water as thoughts, ideas, bits of language. I can tell the
poem-fish from the prose-fish; the poem leaps higher, and its arc can be seen
all at once, which is the great pleasure of writing a poem. In prose –
especially when working on a novel – everything feels more furtive, less
obvious. You can grab the poem-fish barehanded, but the novel requires sitting
for a long time with your lure floating on the surface of the water.
How do the two forms interact? Do
you ever borrow phrases or ideas from one to use in the other?
Ackerman: When I was an
undergraduate, I had two female cats that got pregnant at the same time (my
roommate let in a tom one night), and they had their kittens within days of
each other. I guess their scents got confused, because they began stealing and
nursing each other’s kittens. My prose and poetry sometimes steal each other’s
kittens, as I try to decide where an image or observation belongs.
Addonizio: Once in a while
I’ve found myself stealing a phrase from one of my poems and slipping it into a
novel. I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help myself. It’s like spiking the
punch.
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| Naomi Shihab Nye |
Does one form ever bring
up a subject that you end up pursuing with the other form?
Addonizio: When I wrote my
second book of poems, Jimmy & Rita,
I did it as a verse novel. It’s a story you have to read straight through, from
first poem to last. I never considered writing it as a novel, maybe because I
was too terrified to try the novel form. But later, I continued the story of
those two characters – as a novel. I wanted to find out what happened to them
after Jimmy & Rita ended. And
this time, it felt like it could only be explored in prose, with a deeper
attention to the lives and circumstances of the characters.
Ackerman: There are times
when, after writing a nature essay, I find I have lots of emotional spill-over
and want to work on some poems. Jaguar of
Sweet Laughter, for example, includes many poems set in the Amazon and
Antarctic, which I wrote while traveling there to write essays I included in The Moon by Whale Light. And sensory
observations from both trips went into A
Natural History of the Senses.
Are there are times when
you’re, in fact, combining the forms? Or at least, writing something
in-between?
Ackerman: If I had a choice,
every page of my prose books would be intense, image-laden poetry. But I know
the sun can’t always be at noon in a 300-page book. Books have to have
transitions, contrasts, changes of pace. Still, it’s the more poetic passages
that satisfy me the most. Poetry is a special way of knowing the world, but so
is lyrical, imagistic prose; both usher me into a cyclone of intense alertness,
in which every sensation and detail leaps out, a kind of deep-play rapture I
love.
Addonizio: When we say of
something that it is “pure poetry,” what we mean is that there is a certain
state of being that we connect with through whatever form of art is before us.
Because verse on the page has the greatest capacity to bring us to that state
through language, we’ve named it “poetry.” So when you take the techniques of
verse – lyricism, imagery, and of course concision, metaphor, a heightened
rhythmic sense – and use them in prose, the effect is ravishing.
Does the poetic demand for
economy of language help you in your prose?
Nye: While working on my
(most recent) novel, Going Going, I
dramatically overwrote about five full drafts. One day I woke up realizing I
could cut off the first eighty pages
and the thing would really fly. So that’s what I did…. I thought about how
being a poet – slashing whole stanzas, feeling comfortable identifying the
“scaffolding” in a poem and taking it off once the “real poem heart” emerges –
helped me do something so dramatic.
Addonzio: Poetry taught me
that I must use, as Coleridge put it, “the best words in the best order.” I learned to work very hard at revision, to
ruthlessly jettison what wasn’t working, and to keep challenging myself. I
learned, on the practical level, how to be clear and concise, and how to wake
up my language. When I turned to fiction, I found that these things were an
enormous advantage.
Does the twofold pursuit
offer career advantages?
Nye: Prose-writers are paid
more than poets. It is a shock to many poets to receive a check for $300 or
$400 for a single item (story, essay) – I know it was to me! Poets are used to
being paid a copy of the issue and $14.
Addonizio: It was very
gratifying to be paid for my first novel, Little
Beauties. My agent sold the book just before I turned fifty. My first book
of poetry came out when I was forty. So I spent many years – before and after
publication – working at various jobs and struggling financially. Now I feel I
can breathe a bit easier.
Nye: When my collection of
nonfiction personal essays, Never in a
Hurry, was published, quite a few of my neighbors acted as if I were
finally a real writer. I had finally
published something they felt really comfortable with and actually read and recommended to one another! I
also like being able to give readings which include both poetry and excerpts
from prose – it’s easier on the listener sometimes, to have a longer narrative
block included.
Addonizio: I have found that
readers of my poems – those who have written me to tell me that my work moved
them, or mattered to them in some deep way – are amazing people. Poetry has to
be sought out, in our culture; it isn’t generally put in front of us. Being a
poet who is also a novelist means that maybe I can move poetry a bit more into
the mainstream – whether it’s my own or someone else’s.
Does it help to open up
the perceptive faculties? And give you new challenges?
Addonizio: I failed miserably
as a fiction writer, over and over. I abandoned fiction many times, but
something kept drawing me back, until I finally managed to gain some skills.
Trying a new form, or simply trying any form of writing, is a difficult but
worthwhile lesson. You have to confront your fears and your ego. You don’t get
past them, but you do grow. Then, of course, insanely, you want to do it all
over again.
Ackerman: Writing has always
been my form of celebration and prayer, but it’s also the way I enquire about
the world. Throughout my teens and twenties, poetry was all I knew. I loved
trying to reduce something – the way someone walks, the flutter of a monk
seal’s eyelashes – to the rigorous pungency of an epigram, and still do. But I
sometimes craved more elbow room. So I struggled to learn to write prose, which
didn’t come naturally to me, and was a nightmare chore for years. How I
remember putting one sentence at the top of a page, one sentence at the bottom,
and having absolutely no idea what to put between them! I worked brutally hard
at it for about ten years. Then something finally clicked, and prose became a
familiar country. I discovered that, for me at least, writing poetry and prose
is like riding a bicycle and a horse – they’re different experiences, but many
of the same motor skills apply. Now I find it fun, fascinating, sometimes even
thrilling to write prose. And my muse is happily miscellaneous. I feel lucky to
have been able to use prose as a passport to some of the most astonishing
landscapes.
Kim Addonizio has been called “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” Her latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern CA Book Award; and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton. Her novel-in-verse, Jimmy & Rita,
was recently reissued by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.
Kalima Press published her Selected Poems in Arabic. Addonizio’s many
honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and
Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Other books include two novels from Simon & Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street.
Addonizio offers private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online, and
often incorporates her love of blues harmonica into her readings. www.kimaddonizio.com.
Naomi Shihab Nye has
received a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner
Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her
collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her collection Honeybee
was awarded the Arab-American Book Award. She is currently serving on
the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets. Naomi Shihab
Nye has edited several honored and popular poetry anthologies,
including Time You Let Me In, What Have You Lost?, Salting the Ocean, and This Same Sky, and she is the author of the novels Habibi and Going, Going. She lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.
Michael J. Vaughn is the author of six novels, including Frosted Glass (Dead End Street, Seattle) and Rhyming Pittsburgh (LBF Books, Pittsburgh). His poetry has appeared in more than fifty journals, including Skidrow Penthouse and The Chaffin Journal, and he works as a judge for several Writer's Digest competitions. He lives in San Jose, and plays drums for the San Francisco rock band Exit Wonderland.
Michael J. Vaughn is the author of six novels, including Frosted Glass (Dead End Street, Seattle) and Rhyming Pittsburgh (LBF Books, Pittsburgh). His poetry has appeared in more than fifty journals, including Skidrow Penthouse and The Chaffin Journal, and he works as a judge for several Writer's Digest competitions. He lives in San Jose, and plays drums for the San Francisco rock band Exit Wonderland.
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