--between writing fiction and poetry? folks ask me when they find out I've written a lot of poems for a novelist. Well, writing poetry transcends the personal, for me, whereas fiction relies on empathy. For both forms, I start with an image, a phrase, or an idea. Both forms distill language and meaning--in a poem every word counts, sound and syllable. In fiction, the sentences must advance plot or reveal character. With a novel, revisions are more rigorous, more of a juggle. With so much to take into consideration---characters, scenes, and points of view—it seems counter-intuitive that a novel is more forgiving. But I find that its sprawl makes it more tolerant. “In the novel or short story you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival,” May Sarton once wrote.

“I'm more interested in what Joyce Carol Oates did in Blonde than Seamus Heaney's prize cow. Poets should write novels en masse and reinvent the form and really muck up the landscape...Time is my real subject and calling a book a novel immediately adjusts the reader's perception of time,” said Eileen Myles.
"It is the difference between a diamond and an elephant, " according to Marge Piercy. "Poetry to me is more organic, more passionate, more spiritual, more intense. Fiction is about time – what happens if you make one or another choice. What happens next. And then and then and then, as a result of every choice made, what happens? Fiction to me is an art of empathy and imagination."

Eudora Welty says, "I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly – to give it a form and try to embody it – to hold it and express it in a story’s terms. You have more chance to try it in a novel. A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story – you can work more by suggestion – than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.”

What do you think?