Poetry has been an influence, too

By Jnana Hodson on July 19, 2024

Through much of my adult life, I've spent more time writing and distilling poetry than I did with fiction.

Part of the reason was that poetry fit my once-a-week time for sustained "butt time" addressed to my literary efforts. A novel, in contrast, requires a bigger window, at least for me. I have to admire mothers who put something good together while toddlers and family meals gave little respite.

For me, the practice of poetry, both as a writer and reader, springs from the practice of meditation I took up as a yogi and continued as a Quaker, though now it's once or twice a week rather than daily.

Prose simply feels more secular and aimed more at a general reader. And even there, I've come to see that writing hundreds of thousands of headlines for a living had a poetic component in its brevity. My personal writing was one way of staying sharp there. As for the hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages I designed? They did fall back on that intense visual art training in high school.

Like my fiction, my poetry originated in trying to remember and make sense of what was happening around and within me. Sometimes, when I got around to a manuscript of fiction, I would cannibalize a poem, especially if it hadn't yet been published in a journal. That was especially true when it came to Nearly Canaan and the Secret Side of Jaya.

I wonder if any of this goes back to my childhood interest in chemistry and then being stymied when I wasn't taught algebra when I needed it, back in fifth and sixth grades. Freshman year of high school was too late, my line of inquiry had shifted to classical music and visual art.

Poetry is a kind of equation, even geology, rather than the Friday night football game a novel can play.

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My juggling act between the daily journalism that paid my bills and the literary aspirations that I hoped would finally free me did result in what I've come to see as literary graffiti – flashes written on the run, even when they then underwent much distillation and refining. I think that's most obvious in Subway Visions, Nearly Canaan, and the Secret Side of Jaya but also befits everything except What's Left, and even there may have crept in through the earlier outtakes I wove in.

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Shortly after my books were up at Smashwords, a fine writer I know told me over coffee that I was more of a poet than a novelist. Ouch! He may have even said a better poet than novelist.

I hope I've improved since then and have arrived at a better balance in the revised books.