Why Not Moments

Posted by Phoebe

Amazing video blog from YA Rebel Victoria Schwab on risk taking:


I have to say, one of the ways I think that an MFA was not helpful for me was that it made me more afraid to take risks in my poetry. I have a very loud, very vocal internal editor already. In my very last workshop, I quite literally made apologies for emotional content in my poetry.

And I love emotional content. In 2007 and before, before I came here, I never even considered sentiment a risk.

This might have something to do with why I hardly write poetry these days. I’ll get an idea (I think of ideas in my head as seedlings–admittedly a hackneyed metaphor but I think creative ideas germinate in exactly the same way) and think “How can I make this a good story?” rather than “How can I distill this into a poem?” Part of this, sure, is that I’ve gotten used to having space to develop my ideas–poetry forces you into a sort of conciseness that fiction, even spare, sparse fiction, doesn’t. But I know that part of this is fear. I can take risks in fiction that I don’t feel comfortable taking in poetry. I’m undoubtedly more skilled, more controlled, but to be an effective artist you need to be able to forgo control every once in awhile to make an emotional impact.

I’m not sure what the cure is for this, except, perhaps, time (and maybe intoxication? That’s helped in the past, but I’m too busy these days to be drunk, which is probably a shame). Right now, I’ve been focusing on fiction–and sitting back passively, waiting for the poems to come. Victoria’s vlog is a nice reminder that sometimes, you have to grab these things, to be proactive, to be rash.

(Oh, and if you’re not following the yarebels, and you like YA fiction, you should be.)

Tags: , , , ,

Permalink | Comments (3) | Mar 4, 2010

3 Responses to “Why Not Moments”

  1. Jami Says:
    March 4th, 2010 at 4:31 pm

    I do think it’s hard to go back to poetry after writing fiction. It was really, really hard for me to transition from poetry to fiction, and the reverse is almost as difficult, more so for the “letting emotions take control” aspect than for the craft aspect (though maybe that, too). I took a poetry workshop in my last semester of my MFA program, and it was weird. I hadn’t written a poem in almost ten years. When I did, I was a little too casually wordy, after years of writing fiction that was not wordy enough. Sigh. Maybe my true calling is the prose poem.

  2. Phoebe Says:
    March 4th, 2010 at 7:17 pm

    Hey Jami,

    I love writing prose poems, so I’m with you there. The times I’ve managed to write poetry since graduating, it tends to come in a short burst of (ugh, I do hate this word) “inspiration.” It feels almost like a more structured form of journaling to me; meanwhile, fiction feels more like something to play around in and explore.

    It’s funny–I don’t know that my fiction is necessarily less emotional. But I do feel like poetry is evaluated more closely for its emotional content; a poet is under more personal scrutiny than a fiction writer, maybe just in that all poems are assumed (often correctly) to be autobiographical. Even when writing more non-fictional fiction, I feel like one escapes that a bit in prose. But who knows.

  3. Patrick Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 7:53 pm

    YARBLES?

    (it said my comment was too short so I have to insert this)

Leave a Reply




Powered by WP Hashcash

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree