It’s April, National poetry month, and I’m delighted to have as my first Poetry Tuesday poet my dear friend Elizabeth Rosner. Liz is a prize-winning and national bestselling author of two novels which are as poetic as her book of poems is. After you read her post, follow the link to one of her poems. Enjoy! – Meg
My first novel, The Speed of Light, was published in September 2001 (yes, it was that September, and the first day of my book tour was on the 11th, but that is another story..!). At the time, many of my readers believed I had been a poet before I became a novelist, but that was only partly true. I wrote poems when I was young (didn’t we all?) and I loved to read poetry. I can say this was in spite of the way poetry was taught in school, which sadly is a turn-off to many of us, with the often-deadening emphasis on an analysis of rhyme and meter, with enforced memorization not out of love for language and imagery and the illuminating joy that poems can bring but in order to beat the poor student into imitating someone else’s sing-song voice. I can remember all too well the classes in which we were instructed to discover the “meaning” of the poem under discussion, usually with shovels and pickaxes and dictionaries and self-doubt.
I fell (back) in love with poems as an adult. While I was in my early 20s, in graduate school earning my MFA in Fiction, I made a point of “sneaking around” with some of the MFA candidates in Poetry. At the time (and maybe this is still true), you had to make a definitive selection between poetry and prose. Although there was one student who managed to persuade the University that she wanted to study both, we were all firmly encamped in one Country or The Other. Convinced that we spoke different languages, we tended to hang around with our own kind. And yet, I was utterly fascinated by the professors and practitioners of poetry. I read Rainer Maria Rilke and Frank Bidart and Louise Glück. It slowly dawned on me that my prose was often described as “lyrical,” and that many of my favorite prose writers were described in the same way. The supposedly absolute distinction between prose and poetry was beginning to seem like a very blurry line indeed.
When I completed my MFA Thesis, the result turned out to be a novel that was a thinly disguised memoir (yet more blurry lines!). I felt increasingly confused about the entire concept of form when it came to my own writing, and when a close friend suggested I write a poem about my participation in a project called Acts of Reconciliation, I thought: Why Not? I wrote a poem. And another. And even though I found myself wondering if I wasn’t just writing more prose in shorter lines with more spaces in between the paragraphs/stanzas, I kept going. When I looked back at my thesis, it revealed itself to be (insert pregnant pause here), a poetry collection in disguise. First I was shocked. Then, I was happy. Because by this miracle, I discovered that in writing poetry, my voice and my material were simple and natural and surprisingly unmediated by fear. I could let go of all of my ambition about becoming a Famous Novelist. I could stop worrying about how to make up Excellent Fiction. I could write specifically and honestly and beautifully and plainly. About my childhood, my family, my terrors and dreams and journeys and love affairs. I could Tell the Truth.
One of my biggest breakthroughs came during a weekend workshop for “New Poems” at Esalen Institute with the brilliant poet Sharon Olds. In addition to modeling for all of us what it really meant to be fearlessly self-revealing, she gave us the chance to share brand new work in a safe place. When I admitted to the group that I was afraid my beautiful poems might be empty, she encouraged me to write something I was not going to show to anyone. The next morning, a three-page poem poured out of me, and that poem turned out to be “Disobedient Child.” It was the most courageous piece I’d ever created, and my writing has never been the same.
Eventually I gathered together enough poems to publish a chapbook, called Gravity (now out of print). That collection is what I now refer to as the Autobiographical Companion to my novels (both The Speed of Light and Blue Nude). I am certain that I could never have written either one of those novels if I hadn’t apprenticed myself to the work of poetry. Through the practice of writing poems, I have deepened my sources of subject matter, embraced the qualities of compression and economy, and vowed to make every word count. Even now, I listen to the sounds of lines and words and the spaces in between. Thanks to poetry, I believe that letting go of the “outcome” of my writing has the most liberating effect imaginable, and I return again and again to that meditation. Tell the Truth. Listen Deeply. Let Your Material Teach You What it Wants to Become. Those so-called lines between prose and poetry matter less and less to me now. I write. – Elizabeth
