How do writing prose and writing poetry — the challenges and rewards — differ?
VG: Thanks for those nice words about my fiction! I find that writing a poem which gives me any degree of pleasure at all is harder than writing a short story. Maybe that is because I am further on up the learning curve with the short story form, I don’t know. As with the fiction, I have to be ‘saying’ something, hopefully showing the reader something about how I see the world. I need a greater degree of bravery to send poems out there – it’s still a very new form of writing for me. I am studying, too. At the moment I am in the middle of a series of one-to-one tutorials with the poet Judith Kazantzis whose political poetry I like very much. http://www.judithkazantzis.com/ I do not send many poems out yet, and am delighted when something places. EDP: How do you know whether an idea will be expressed better as a poem or in prose? VG: That is a hard question to answer. I write a lot of flash fiction, and often find that actually I have written a poem, only I’ve set it out wrong! Conversel
