Dramatizing the Interior Life: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

Stephanie Burt writes in The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard University Press, 2016), “[A task] still best fitted to poetry” [is to] let us imagine someone else’s interior life.” [Poems] “project a voice and embody a compelling or attractive individual consciousness, which we can then hear, or speak, or sing, or try on, or try out, as if it were our own.”

As someone who writes both poetry and fiction, and often a blend of both in verse novels, I have a strong reaction to this quote. Perhaps imagining another's interior life is a task best fitted to poetry but showing that interior life through action in the world is a task best suited to fiction. Either way, however, whether a writer begins with the interior life of a character ("individual consciousness") or with how the character acts in the world, the writer's imagination is needed to move from the one to the other. Some of us are more skilled with one, some with the other. Sometimes when I'm stalled, switching from interiority to the external action works to shake up my imagination or vice versa. Try this as an exercise to flex your imagination.