Reading as an Apprentice Time Traveler

POETRY stops time, but narrative depends on time’s movement—or that’s what I learned in my heady college days. It’s a useful contrast even if it begins to disintegrate as soon as you put a little pressure on it. Diane Seuss says something similar, writing about the difference between lyric poems and lyric essays for the anthology A Harp in the Stars (University of Nebraska Press, 2021): “In poems, everything happens at once. Past and future are an agreed-upon illusion.” She chooses to write an essay instead of a poem, therefore, when her material “demands temporal sequencing.” A few paragraphs later, however, Seuss collapses the binary—I love her work’s embrace of contradiction—arguing that neither poetry nor essays can be defined by their relationship to time, voice, or any other element. Ultimately, she writes, with italics for extra punch, “It’s a lyric essay because I say it is.”

I never earned an MFA, taking a scholar’s route to academia and writing my own poems on the sly, with fiction and nonfiction arriving later. Making literature has been mostly a solitary effort, a matter of trial and error—emphasis on error. There’s lots to learn, I’ve found, from how authors describe what they’re up to. When I read literature closely, though, I often find discrepancies between what the owner’s manual says and how the text operates. Pacing is especially challenging: The mechanics often disobey excellent guidelines laid out by craft books