Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m more of a myth-creator than a painter of portraits… But still…
It’s been almost 2 years since I published my last poetry book, The Lightness Of Leaving. I spent these 2 years living it, in a way. I continue to do so, in general, and also in my relationship with writing. There’s been a leaving taking place and there was and is an actual lightness to it. But not only.
There was and continues to be something else, something that wants to be born, perhaps. But it’s not an easy becoming. This has been a profoundly difficult transition, with waves of emptiness, grief, frustration, pain… And also a sense of curiosity that doesn’t want to be denied, that without being specific at all lets me feel that there is something that wants to be seen, explored and perhaps even said. Not through poetry but through fiction.
Writing is a rather lonely form of creativity. But then again, there are millions of writers in the world. I am not (of course I am not) the only one ever finding myself on a (writing) path that is equally fascinating and close to impossible to walk.
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running through a house.
—Ann Carson
These days, I find great consolation realizing that there have been poets before me, who like I at some point found themselves at the end of their poet-path. Strangely, for them too the shift was accompanied by fairly significant changes in their physical life or abilities. They too felt lost and then equally drawn to and unable to write fiction instead. For them too the transition took years.
I don’t know if I will ever find myself on the other side of it. That’s fine. That’s life. We don’t know much about where we’re going or where we’re going to end. We are imagining the journey, and that’s enough to keep us moving. Also, joy helps.
…maybe at a certain moment the way I was practicing poetry did not allow me to make the next step in poetry, and so I made it in prose —all that to me is somehow irrelevant. It’s the ongoing continuity of a lifelong effort to say what it is—whatever it is—one has to say.
—Paul Auster
