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Why Interiority Matters in Poetry
Learning how to breathe more life into poems.
Poetry is an art form that requires selectivity. But the relative brevity of a poem should not exclude an immersive experience for the reader. Indeed, it can even enhance it.
In this essay, I want to talk about the concept of “interiority” in poetry. Interiority might be best defined as a character’s internal life: their thoughts, emotions, background independent of the story. Interiority is context and the inner psychology of a character.
We know crafting a poem is different than writing a novel, short story, or essay. While all of these forms ask an economy of language of the writer, poetry takes it much further.
Interiority is a concept writers must deal with in novel and short story forms. How do we give our characters dimensionality and believability? How do we create a fully fleshed out world? How do we enable our readers to get inside the minds of characters and the decision-making process that drives the plots of our stories?
But I would argue that interiority gets less attention than it deserves in poetry — or beyond writing, in visual arts like photography and painting. I’ll come back to that thought later, but I want to discuss the idea of developing interiority in poetry.