I’ve realized that I feel less constrained when writing poetry than when writing essays/blog posts. Essays are more time-consuming for me—I spend a lot of time adding links, fact-checking my points, and organizing them in a coherent way, and I feel like I have to stake out a clear position when writing in prose. Whereas in poetry, the rules have more to do with making the form and content work well together, and evoking an emotional response in the reader.
I also think poetry is a good medium for expressing ambiguity. I’ve written a few draft poems in my notebook about EA themes, and they pose moral dilemmas in EA without imposing a straightforward answer to them. Here’s one to illustrate what I mean:
“is this creative accounting?” I think to myself as I enter donation amounts into my spreadsheet - amounts of other people’s money that they might have given anyway - just not to my chosen charity
I feel like providing a straightforward answer to a complex problem wastes the potential of poetry. You might as well write a persuasive essay instead.
Also, a lot of us are writing blog posts; far fewer of us are writing poetry to communicate EA ideas.
I’ve realized that I feel less constrained when writing poetry than when writing essays/blog posts. Essays are more time-consuming for me—I spend a lot of time adding links, fact-checking my points, and organizing them in a coherent way, and I feel like I have to stake out a clear position when writing in prose. Whereas in poetry, the rules have more to do with making the form and content work well together, and evoking an emotional response in the reader.
I also think poetry is a good medium for expressing ambiguity. I’ve written a few draft poems in my notebook about EA themes, and they pose moral dilemmas in EA without imposing a straightforward answer to them. Here’s one to illustrate what I mean:
I feel like providing a straightforward answer to a complex problem wastes the potential of poetry. You might as well write a persuasive essay instead.
Also, a lot of us are writing blog posts; far fewer of us are writing poetry to communicate EA ideas.