Great Interview with Mary Karr in the new Paris Review

January 11, 2010

The whole thing is worth reading (and there’s a great anecdote in there about when DFW told Karr’s mother he was going to marry her daughter), but this particular statement by Karr struck me and started me thinking:

The poet loves the world, and the prose writer wants to create an alternate reality.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think that although my prose writing fits that statement, my poetry does not. I think my poetry generally tends to be about the things that suck in this world. I do love the world, honestly I do, but you wouldn’t know it from my poetry.

I sort of wonder if Karr has this idea about poets because she isn’t one? Or if I don’t agree because I’m not really a poet, either–just a prose writer who sometimes writes poetry? Or maybe the moral of the story is this: generalizations about writing never work out. Not sure, but I thought about this quote for a long time, so I thought I’d share it and see what other people think.