15 December 2018
I grew up with the idea that being a poet is for truly exceptional people, while anyone can have a go at prose. Maybe it was the fault of my school, which instilled a sort of awe for anyone who writes poetry. Schoolbooks and teachers portrayed poets as superior beings, with great virtues and sometimes fascinating vices; they were in permanent dialogue with the gods, thanks to the Muses—able to look at past and future as no one else did, and naturally they had an exceptional talent for language. I found this paralysing, and so at a certain point I reduced their status in my mind. But I became an assiduous reader of poetry.
I love the connections poetry makes, so unexpected and bold that they become indecipherable. I’m sure that writing mediocre poems is a mortal sin; if people still mainly told their stories in verse, as they did for many centuries, I would be too embarrassed to write. But even if, after a long battle, prose now occupies almost all the narrative space, deep inside I feel that it’s a constitutionally inferior form of writing. This is probably what has driven me since I was a girl to exaggerate with language; part of me aspires to the poetic and hates the prosaic—I want to prove that I’m not inferior.
But writing prose with the rhythm, the harmony, the images that characterise a poem is a death trap. What in verse can give form to a dazzling truth, in prose becomes the falsest of affectations. The sentence takes on a rhythmic cadence, the words and images are sentimental, the need to avoid the ordinary leads to bizarre formulations and artificial expressions. It’s as if the writer believes that aiming for some kind of poetic truth means the prose has to become lyrical. It took me—a slave to good poetry, but incapable of making it—a long time to understand that. I strove for writing that was lofty, vigorous, full of ostentatious verbal inventions.
Then I said to myself that poetry—or, if you prefer, beauty—should be achieved line by line, through the medium of prose—that is, keeping strictly to a form of expression that is effective and clear. It’s an easy plan to make, but a hard and laborious one to put into practice. I go back and forth. Today I am self-indulgent, tomorrow I am self-punishing—and I am never happy with the results. Through a fear of making everything too lyrical, I compose cold, inexpressive sentences. Out of exhaustion, I return to the rough draft with all its sloppiness, rather than settle for yet another beautiful, refined, unbearably artificial version.
The urge to make every line a marvel is strong. The only thing I seem to have learned is to throw away the page that dazzles with its style—and thus obscures the portrayal of nature and human endeavour.