The effect of prose on poetry
Lately, I haven’t been reading much poetry. I set a goal for myself at the beginnng of the year to read something like a hundred poems a month. I was doing really well for the first four months - by the beginning of May, I’d read over 400 poems, from journals like Poetry and the American Poetry Review, as well as online journals like Wicked Alice, Stirring, 21 Stars, Diquieting Muses and Apple Valley Review. I could feel the nature of my poems changing - I moved toward a style that was more stream-of-consciousness, more fragmented. I felt it was truer to my circular way of thinking than my previous attempts at more structured narratives.
But since May, I’ve sort of given up on poetry. Well, not entirely. I just haven’t been able to put my mind to it in quite the same way. So instead I’ve been reading quite a bit of fiction, and some personal essays. And now I’m realizing that my poetry is changing again - this time, instead of changing style, I’m changing content. Prior to the shift to reading prose, I was writing a lot of poems about my life - divorce poems, love poems, poems about children. These are things that have meant a great deal to me, and so of course found their way into my writing.
But now I see my writing shifting toward subjects of greater universality - race, gender and sexual expression, politics, war, peace. I’d like to think I’m finding a way to tie these universal concepts to my own life, that I’m grounding them in tangible, believable experience. I don’t know for sure.
So how about you? How does what you’re reading affect what you’re writing?
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