I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Interpretation
Even a failed poet can gain insight and creativity from poetry, influencing their writing style.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward reflects on her identity as a failed poet and how the experience of reading poetry enriches her understanding of the world. She emphasizes the importance of figurative language in her prose, highlighting a contrast with contemporary trends in fiction that may prioritize straightforwardness over artistic expression.
In practice
This quote can be used in a writing workshop to encourage participants to explore figurative language in their own work.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.
Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.
I doubt that I could create a character I loathed simply because when a character takes life, it is impossible not to be a little amazed by the phenomenon, and to find that the amazement has something of the quality of delight.
Films that are easy to sell happen to be the worst films. Look at the poster for 'Wrath of the Titans' and 'John Carter': they're exactly the same. You could switch titles.
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).
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