Why the short lines? Poets Q&A with Rae Armantrout

A new Poets Q&A is up over at Smartish Pace, this time with Rae Armantrout. Past Q&As have included Robert Creeley, Sherman Alexie, Stephen Dunn, Jorie Graham, and others. The Q&A ain't a regular interview; it almost reads like an advice column, with people writing in to have their have their most burning questions addressed. When asked what books she's reading these days, Armantrout cites Ben Lerner's new novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and Anselm Berrigan's Notes from Irrelevance. Also interesting:

Dear Rae
Why
the short
lines and
when did
it start
for you
and can you
imagine
writing long
narrative poems
without
being sick
to your
stomach?

M. Barrett -- Baltimore, MD

This is a very interesting, if somewhat loaded, question. It interests me because I don’t really know the answer.

Let me say first off that I do occasionally write prose poems or poems with longish lines such as “Scumble” from Versed or “The Deal” from Money Shot. And I published a prose memoir called True in 1999. You’re right, though, that I can’t see myself writing long narrative poems – at least not poems with one continuous narrative – any time soon. I am too interested in edges, angles, intersections, and even collisions. I want the poem to be open to whatever occurs next, to be able to swerve to accommodate it – or meet it anyway. And the breaks between lines and stanzas can be opportunities for such swerves.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy good fiction. But in the fiction I like best, say Proust or Melville, the story unfolds so slowly that the narrative is attenuated. There’s all the time in world for a chapter called, for instance, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The narrative burden is suspended in chapters like that and language moves more quickly and unpredictably as a result.

Remember how Archimedes, when speaking of the power of leverage, said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the earth.” I imagine the fiction writer using such a lever. The problem, of course, is finding a place to stand in outer space (or outside time) from which to wield such a device. I guess I’m saying that, since I can’t find a place outside time to stand, I don’t feel comfortable writing narrative. But that’s just me.

Anyway, to come back down to earth, I can say a few things about how my short line developed. My mother read me poetry when I was a kid. In fact, she read me long, narrative poems like “Hiawatha,” by Thomas Eakins, as well as children’s verse. In sixth grade I wrote a book report in the meter of “Hiawatha.” When I was in my teens, I discovered William Carlos Williams. I was very taken by Williams. (Why him? I couldn’t say.) I was beginning to write then and I wanted to jettison the heavy handed meters I had learned as a child so I deliberately started to use a shorter, Williamsesque line. (I realize now, of course, that not all metric poetry is so heavy-handed!) As I worked with this short line, I got increasingly interested in the effects line breaks could produce – suspense, double-meaning, etc.

In the interest of full disclosure, I might add that I write in a lined notebook and I have really big sloppy handwriting. That may also have something to do with what I see as a line. (?)

Read the rest of the Q&A here.