Mike Rose on Writing Poetry & Poetic Prose

00:08 [Mike Rose] I'll tell ya, a very interesting thing happened with me and poetry. Poetry was what I started to cut my teeth on with writing. When I was a young man, I would live these little poems, and they were pretty awful. They were beery, sad romances, 20-something's laments for lost love. They were—

00:30 I look back on them now and I wince. But I kept at, and I kept at it, and I kept at it, and I kept at it, and finally I think I got decent at it. And thank God I moved away from the world of the beery romance to the world of my forbears. And I began to write a lot about these Italian immigrants coming over, the hard life they led, but also the quirks and the interests and the

01:00 pleasures that were part of that life as well. As I did all that, even going back to the early stuff that was not good at all to the stuff that finally got moderately okay, I was teaching myself a huge amount about writing, and a huge amount about me. So poetry for me became my workshop, my artist's workshop, my woodworker's workshop, my laboratory,

01:30 whatever metaphor you want to use. It's where I really learned a lot about crafting a sentence, about honing an image, about the dramatic moment. Here's the odd thing that happened: When I began the early stages of what would become Lives on the Boundary, writing these little prose vignettes about where I grew up and the classrooms I remember, as I began to do that,

02:00 I wrote less and less poetry. Eventually, I couldn't write a poem if you held a gun to my head. It stopped, it somehow completely stopped. And the only thing I could figure—and I'm somebody who studied creativity, for God's sake, and it still puzzles me—but the only thing I can figure is that that desire, that energy, that passion, that went into the writing of the poetry

02:30 drifted, somehow made its way into prose and led to, then, a kind of writing that I hope has some of the features of the poem—the image, the metaphor, the compressed language, the desire to create a moment that somehow is resonant. I hope that what happened is that those techniques

03:00 and those linguistic desires made their way into the prose because it's the only way I can explain the fact that I haven't written a poem in twenty years, I have no desire to write a poem, and if you locked me up in a room right now and gave me forty Eight hours, I could not write one for you. I could, however, sit down and write some prose sketches pretty quickly and readily, and I think you would find in them some of those kinds of poetic techniques. So for me, anyway,

03:30 poetry became not the way that I would express myself as an adult, but it sure became my workshop. It became the place where I learned how to do what I do today.