Robert Polito's 'Instantly Familiar' Talk on Luc Sante

"Poetry of Fact," a talk on Luc Sante (among other subjects) that Robert Polito gave at AWP this year was posted at Graywolf Press in April, and excerpted today at Berfrois. "'Already dead. . . . a corpse. . . . wrestled'—Sante’s spirited phrasing shapes a hard-boiled reformulation of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous invocation of a poem as a mind thinking," writes Polito. Here he also troubles the need to distinguish, noting that many of his favorite books "tend to operate along the seams of poetry, fiction, and essay." And on:

“I write prose with a poet’s head. . . . Without sounding utterly pretentious, I do think of almost everything I write as a poem—certainly all three of my big books. The chapters are strophes. It’s not an account. It’s not a history. I’m not a historian—I’ve never pretended to be one—and I’m not giving a definitive account of anything. It’s a very, very subjective approach to the past, to a certain time and place. It’s carved in a particular way. It favors certain narratives over certain others. It’s intended above all else to be an experience.”

For me, as a poet and also as a nonfiction writer—mostly of essays, biography, and criticism—Sante’s observations are immensely appealing, and instantly familiar. I read a lot of prose, fiction and nonfiction, watch a lot of movies, but everything I know about writing prose comes from reading and writing poems—and this is true of large organization conundrums, such as form, design, and structure, as well as local cavils, such as diction, sounds, pauses, breaks, and rhythm.

Find it all at Graywolf.