In this dishy interview with Lunch Ticket, Anna Scotti, poet and author of Lightscatter Press's first prize winning collection Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, talks about the 'you' of the poem, organizing a whole collection, and publishing a book in a pandemic:
In fiction, we take things from our own lives and things we hear, and we fictionalize them, and we make them up, and we appropriate them for our own, but somehow I think there’s this feeling with poets sometimes that that’s dishonest when done in a poem, and I don’t think it is. I think to give it that emotional truth, sometimes the literal truth won’t work in a poem and you have to adjust it.
“You” is a way to hide sometimes. It’s a way to write about something that’s too painful to say “I” about, and so you say “you,” and I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily because I think when we say “you” in a poem, it can create an immediacy and bring the reader or the listener in[to] what we’re saying. When someone says “you,” you kind of perk up, like, “Oh, they’re talking to me.”
To read the interview, click here.
Comments