In this series, I’ll ask writers a question about “the one.” That one thing could be about their writing process, their personal experiences, or even writers they admire. The idea is to focus on a detail that (hopefully) reveals more about their writing life. My first installment in this series is with a friend and writer who I greatly admire, Cynthia Cruz. She is a poet, essayist, professor and critic who seems to flow seamlessly between many forms of writing. I first met her nearly 20 years ago as a poet, and that lyricism has always felt like the backbone of her work. This is why I asked her:
What’s the one thing writing poetry gives you that essays or prose cannot?
“I write about things I don’t know the answers to—both with essays and with poetry—but that doesn’t mean I come to any clean conclusions or answers in the end. Both allow me to pursue questions I don’t know the answers to, to move a tiny bit nearer to knowing. Having said that, poetry allows me to use gaps, ruptures, and space which in turn allow for a folding in of hesitation and silence; a kind of troubling and haunting that prose does not allow or at least does not allow to the same extent.
What has consumed me from the start is the question of how to write about experiences either personal or historical that cannot be said. Here, I am thinking of experiences that can’t be articulated either because they can only be expressed through space, gaps, or ruptures. Trauma, for example, fractures and fragments experience by definition. Any attempt at explaining trauma through concise syntax in which there occur beginning, middle and end, will fail. Prose insists on the complete sentence. When it does not, it veers into the lyric which I call poetry.
So poetry, like visual art, with, for instance the montage or collage or film still, does allow for these fragments and stutters, these ways of simulating silence or stammering. Poetry also allows for what I call a haunting—for allowing a space or rupture for what cannot be articulated but must be acknowledged. In my forthcoming collection, Dregs, for instance, I am using space on the page, as well as iterations of the stutter or other hesitations to enact these places where what must be said but cannot be must remain as gaps to allow for the acknowledgment of their absence.”
Find samples of Cynthia Cruz’s poetry here, and look for her fifth book of poems, Dregs, this fall.
Nightcap Newburgh 