Author: Danielle Gonzalez

As a person who now writes fiction sometimes I am hesitant into where it falls in regard to poetry. I remember once writing a poem that was in the early stages of editing. One of the things that drew me to edit this poem further was that I wrote it purposefully with a feel-good moment, that made me feel joy later when I reread it to myself. When one of my friends (@Grace) read it I could see her smile form as I followed her eyes down the stanzas. At the end, she asked me, was this a memory of you are you sister, right? When I told her that the poem was a work of fiction she looked taken aback for she felt that real emotion was there, I think there was too. I think that’s an interesting aspect of poetry, that it can include fiction or nonfiction without stating it explicitly to the reader. As someone who involves both fiction and nonfiction in my poems, it’s interesting to think that the reader may try to tell the difference since a lot of poems tend to engage us emotionally speaking.

Poems are vessels that can be used to hold emotion, even if we do not experience the literal aspect of the poems in real life. I like to think of my poems like a sample size perfume. You get the scent and know what it is going for (hopefully), you know how the lines are trying to reach into your mind and activate something that the author could never guess was there.

In poetry, often I use what I have learned from fiction writing to draw up an intimate world, that at its core, is powered by the desired feeling. I hope this doesn’t make me an artificial poet, that I can recreate events that have no technical connection to me, scenes that read as non-fiction that isn’t, hugs between imagined siblings that are inspired by my own love of my sister and our childhood innocence.

When I first started to write poetry, I pictured it as capturing a flash in a moment, one snapshot. Not to say this is never the case, but I’m learning that if you want to show your readers a log cabin, how you let readers arrive at the scene plays a role in letting the readers find their way, that they can linger in a sentence, or speed along quickly enjoying the momentum of the piece, that the poem doesn’t have to be standstill; there is a journey in reading along.

My command of sound is more tied to the visuals of the poem, such as how I prefer shorter lines look on a page with my poems surrounded by plenty of white space. I often keep my poetry terse and as close to the point as I can, and I try to root out unnecessary words, so my lines are typically shorter than average. While this tends to make my poetry read more slowly, as the pacing is heavier on each word I choose to keep in the poem, it is often unintentional. When I do read through lines of my poetry my mind is more concerned with how the individual words carry meaning and how they can best be expressed through insights in the poem’s line and how it captures a snapshot I think with my work I am often trying to express a moment in time and I try to carry the readers to that rather than considering the reading itself as the real experience. When I envision what I am writing about, it is so vivid to me that I do not consider the reader’s experience or question the gaps between reasoning in my poetry. I write from a snapshot perspective. Due to this, I tend to use more abstract terms in my writing, assuming that everyone is holding on to the same visual that I am.

I’ve never been on such a level of my work where I consider the impact of word combinations but I am eager to start my journey with sound. I look forward to learning how to surround my reader with my words in a way that they take their time through the piece, that my readers may not just see what I’ve fleshed out, but they can breathe in it as well.