POETRY
by Peter Straub
I did love poetry with a full, overflowing heart for most of my young manhood and, in fact, still do. I buy a lot of poetry; I read a lot of poetry; I have shelves full of poetry books. I can’t write it anymore. I’m not quite sure that I wrote poetry at all well. But anyhow, though, I certainly did it with great dedication for years.
What it did for me was to allow me to pay great attention to individual phrases, individual words, to the cadences of sentences as they moved across the page. It made me far more linguistically aware than I would have been otherwise. Also, it made me more aware of the way the writing sounded in one’s ear. There are writers who I read sometimes that you can tell have no idea how their work sounds. They can be very, very good writers, although their work is actually very ugly.
To choose a case that’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or insult anybody, Theodore Dreiser was a great example of this. He wrote ugly sentences, and you can tell the sound of the language meant nothing to him at all. It’s a little punishing to read, but nonetheless he is a marvelous and great American writer.
Salon, February 15, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment