Kim Addonizio: The Poet by Starlite
What’s the difference for you in writing fiction and poetry?
I’ve been asked this question a lot. I don’t really know how to answer it. Fiction is both easier and harder. I can get into a piece of prose much more easily than I can get a poem started. But once a poem is underway, I’m inside it, in a place that feels slightly deeper than the psychic space I enter writing prose. Poetry is a little harder to surface from.
How long do you typically work on a poem?
I usually work obsessively on something for a few days and then put it away for a few months. I often forget I’ve written something until I go back later. That way I can see it a little more as though I didn’t write it, which is very helpful. I have a poem that’s been hanging around for a couple of years, waiting for the right ending. I pull it out every once in a while and work on it, and never get it right. One of these days, though, the ending will come—at least I hope it will, because I really like the beginning and middle.
Do you ever know immediately after drafting a poem that you will discard it, or do you keep it for awhile to gain objectivity? What makes you decide to stop working on a poem?
I usually think it’s good right after I’ve written it. But time tends to sort that out, which is why I wait to see. I stop working on stuff that I lose interest in.
You have said, “Fear of failure is the biggest thing that blocks creativity. It makes you give up too soon on a project, or on a writing life.” Can you expand on that?
Anyone who has tried to write probably recognizes that fear. There’s a lot of anxiety that goes with writing. What if I burn out before the end? What if it sucks? Why am I doing this, anyway? Maybe I’m not good enough…The only way you can find out is to do it. And you have to be okay with the idea that you might fail at it, and that something else will come of that—a new direction for your writing, or for your life.
Poetry publication seems to occupy a marginal place in American culture, yet more people seem to be writing poetry than ever before. Do you think the poetic urge arises independently of reading poetry, or in response to it?
Great question. A lot of people seem to want to write poetry without ever needing to read it. Of course, they’re usually awful poets, because a talent for poetry doesn’t arise independently of reading it. And anyway that’s not the poetic urge, that’s the urge to express yourself. We all have that. It’s the source, but it’s not the execution. The execution takes work.
In your new book, Lucifer at the Starlite, you write in both formal and free verse. Do you think it’s important for a poet to be able to do both?
Yeah, I do think it’s important to know the tradition. It’s part of apprenticing yourself to the art. How can you be a poet without appreciating Shakespeare? And how can you appreciate Shakespeare fully until you know how brilliantly he used iambic pentameter, and the sonnet form? So you need to study it, at least. And it helps to physically try to do it, if you’re studying it, so you get an idea of how it all works. That doesn’t mean you do it later in your mature practice. But you need to pass through it. I can’t think of any serious artist who has skipped ahead. You don’t leap over; you go through.
What is the function of the line break in free verse?
Everything I know about the line, I put into the two books I did on writing, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius. There’s a lot I don’t know, because I basically go from my own practice and not some theory of the line. Whatever theories I have are based on my own experience. There are ways to break the line that I have no clue about, because I haven’t done them.
