Pattiann Rogers Quotes
I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.
I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.
When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.
I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.
The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.
Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...
If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.
I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.
I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.
It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.
A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.
To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.
I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.
I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.
The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.
My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.
Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.
The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.
I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.
