Thinking About Poetry — Alex Guenther

Interview with a Poet

What a joy to “interview” Alex Guenther! Thanks to the wonders of email in the modern world, we had good conversations — though he currently lives in Thailand. His wealth of experiences create a deep reservoir for his poetry.

Be sure to see his work Alex Guenther

For you, poetry is…

If you’ll indulge me, I have two completely contradictory answers to this. I feel very strongly that poetry is what we perceive whenever we pay heightened attention to language. It could be random words on billboards, or book spines, but to an audience concentrating in the right way, it’s poetry. Actually, maybe it doesn’t even need to start out as language at all, and could be snail tracks on a tree or the way a cloth moves in the wind. There’s a kind of magic trick where if you look carefully enough at something as if it might be poetry — it is.

On the other hand, as someone who thinks about history a lot, I can’t get rid of the idea that in every traditional culture poetry was words fitting into a defined form. Vedic octosyllables, Homeric hexameter, Germanic alliteration, Japanese tanka — it needed to fit into a form. These were often literally magic spells that people recited, chanted, memorized tens of thousands of lines of. I do also have this much more…