The best kind of poem, I think, is that which delights readers by drawing them toward another world, whether that world is located closer to the real or closer to the fantastic. Perhaps delight at being drawn toward another world is the criterion of excellence for all creative work, not specifically poems. Nevertheless, this criterion has become, through my writing of the present poems, my guiding principle as a poet. My poems, if they succeed, are windows to other worlds. Because these worlds are not, and cannot be, wholly developed in individual poems, readers see in each poem only a part of a vastly larger realm and what is not seen is unknown, a mystery. Here, the ordinary is decontextualized and strange, and the bizarre, too, is decontextualized and has a weight like that of the ordinary. The field of possibility is leveled; anything could happen. This is frightening. Looking through the windows of the poems, the reader may predict that terrible things are about to happen in these other worlds, but they are helpless to intervene. Fascination is perhaps the only option. I would be pleased to have my readers say that they felt compelled by my poems and that their being compelled left them wondering what caused people, in reading, not only to imagine things that did not exist but to care about them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-1177 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Kimbrell, Gregory |
| Publisher | VCU Scholars Compass |
| Source Sets | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | © The Author |
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