For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Sometimes it’s like that. I go, ‘You know what? I’m going to just change scales. I’m going to even change instruments. And I’m going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,’ and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It’s like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.
They’re very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn’t think they would be, but they are.
My parents’ generation was definitely pre-telly, and they knew how to entertain each other. Everybody knew something that they could do – a song or a poem, or a piece of music. At school, I remember being a cat and then a budgie and then a bumble bee. I obviously thought all that was marvelous.
If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that’s a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don’t like the melodies, and vice versa.
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I’ve written mainly novels ever since.
I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.
When somebody’s in love with you, they think it’s amazing you’ve written them a poem, and when they don’t love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don’t get it, I’m not sure why you are doing it.
A writer’s work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
I want the poem to be an experience – for both the listener and for myself.
A person who’s only suffering can’t write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth.
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
