dumbfoundry

You've recently been published in other literary forms - a play, a novel. Does this mean that you are coming up against the limits of what poetry can do for you? Or are you taking poetry into the 'enemy camp'?

[John Kinsella]: ... other genres have always accompanied my poetry and explorations of poetic form. I question genre division, and my recent novel, Genre, is an example of this. It challenges our preconceptions regarding form and prescribed reading patterns. Poetry is limitless, but so are other forms. I'm never not a poet, no matter what I write. But then, maybe I'm always a playwright, a novelist, a critic and so on. The enemies of poetry tend, in my mind, to be internal rather than external - those who attempt to define exactly what constitutes poetry, and more worryingly, what doesn't. For me, a poem must achieve what it sets out to do in its own terms. I recognise the 'limits' of tradition - of line length, rhythm, metre, rhyme, etc - and employ them regularly, but only to explode what it is I should or shouldn't be doing.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Sunday, June 18, 2006 at 1:07 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.