Daniel Poppick Says 'This Is Poetry'

The Adroit Journal features a conversation between Daniel Poppick, author most recently of Fear of Description, which won the National Poetry Series, and Keith Kopka. Kopka begins by asking, is some of the poetry in the book, well, poetry? Poppick answers:

Daniel Poppick: Thanks so much, Keith. I don’t think “Is this poetry?” is necessarily a cliché question—I think I’m actively courting it these days, actually. But the prose poems here are definitely, emphatically poems, even as they push hard toward something else. Around the time I began writing Fear of Description I became aware of these uncanny little moments in my life—ranging from the mundane to truly creepy shit, say from putting together a jigsaw puzzle with my friends while feeling depressed about the 2016 election (“Rumors”) to communicating with a dead dog through a Ouija board (“A View of Vesuvius”). I felt that if I were to try to put these into a poem, I would somehow falsify and ruin the moment. As I turned 30 I recognized them as guideposts, and I sensed that in sum they mapped some territory that I couldn’t define—but for a variety of reasons I was utterly uninterested in writing in a traditionally confessional or post-confessional lyric mode. So I was at a bit of a loss.

Around this time I came across Bashō’s long haibun, The Narrow Road to Oku—a prose travelogue broken up by a series of haiku. I’d been reading prose like this by living poets for a while, people who narrate their own experiences in ways that feel alive to something outside of themselves—Dana Ward’s books, Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, and Jennifer Moxley’s stunning portrait-of-an-artist memoir, The Middle Room, just to name a few—but until reading The Narrow Road to Oku I’d never thought about narrative prose as something that could be an explicitly lyric form.

Anticipating the break into lyric at the end of a “story,” or whatever, as Bashō does, was liberating. It allowed a pressure to build up that was productive rather than restrictive, and it mirrored the way I experience poetry in my everyday life—a rupture with everyday tediousness that makes everything feel more electric, or a wake-up call from my own reflexive, quasi-narcotic responses to the horror of our political reality. I need that sense of possibility from poetry, otherwise what’s the point? So, “Is this poetry?” In insisting that it is, I suppose I’m actually insisting, in a roundabout way, that life is worth more than the trash fire of our present.

Read more at the Adroit Journal!