MFA Greensboro Alum Scott Owens Talks about a Life-Changing Moment for His Writing

Bending the Rules: Or a Poet Has to Be a Poet (Life Changing Moments Series)
This week I'm pleased to share Scott Owens as the next contributor to the Life Changing Moments Series of blog posts. I first "met" Scott online, but last year, Tammy and I were able to talk with him in person at the Blue Ridge Writers Conference (in Blue Ridge, GA). Later this year, we'll be reading our poetry at one of his Poetry Hickory events (in Hickory, NC).

So, Robert wrote to me with a simple request: write a 500-1,000 word personal story about a moment that helped guide my life or shape my worldview. Easy, right? No need to complicate things, just tell about the time I learned the meaning of love while holding my sick 4-month old daughter at 2:00 A.M.; or the moment my stepson burned himself and in caring for him I realized that I had overcome my own childhood abuse and was ready to fully embrace fatherhood; or the night I listened to my grandfather string stars together into his own constellations and recognized the power of creativity and self-determination; or the time when I was 8 and had to reach up inside a birthing cow and turn the calf so it could come out and realized none of us can do it alone. Easy, right?

The problem is, all of the moments I could think of I have already written about in the form of poems, and telling those stories now as prose would seem somehow sacrosanct, a reductionist undoing. The poems, I hope, embody the tensions of those moments, recreate the epiphanies as if they were the readers as well as mine, retain the life of the moment in a combination of language, imagery, and association that might well be lost in the single-minded clarity of prose. At least that's how the poetry-lover in me thinks. As a teacher of poetry, I would never ask a student to retell the story of Galway Kinnell's "Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" in prose. I would, of course, invite them to write about the poem in prose, but not to try to prosaically recreate the moment of the poem by undoing, even negating the energy contained and conveyed through the poetic compression of the moment's perceptual, physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual experience.

Read the full article here: http://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/2012/01/bending-rules-or-poet-has-to-be-poet.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org