Mark Strand on Fiction vs. Poetry

Well, fiction draws you out of yourself. Fiction creates a world into which you can imagine yourself. You identify with characters. You move in a plot that is different from the plot you live in every day. Poetry, I think, draws you into yourself, and you sort of — you engage with the world in a different way. I mean, you engage with the world as you know it, but slightly altered. It’s still your world, it’s not a world of other people.

From a PBS Interview after he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1999.

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What we want while reading a novel is to get on with it. A poem works the opposite way, it encourages slowness, urges us to savor each word. It is in poetry that the power of language is most palpably felt. But in a culture that favors speed-reading, along with fast food , ten-second news bites, and other abbreviated forms of ingestion, who wants something that makes you slow down?

From his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1991, via The Weather of Words, a great little book with short pieces of entertaining poetry-related prose by Mark Strand.