Poetry is like the human soul entire distilled into very few words and they’re power packed. You can get a whole beginning, middle, and end in 10 lines. Poetry, because of the language we choose, because of the metaphors we use, we can make the reader feel something pretty powerful in those few words.
Maybe Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat, they do it I’m sure with their prose, but you take sort of the average prose and you look at a paragraph or a chapter, you don’t get that full emotional power-packed movement and energy and that complete beginning, middle, and end, not to say one is better than the other.
But I will say this, I took a poetry — I took a playwriting class back when I was in college and it was a master class and it was taught by Cicely Tyson, Douglas Turner Ward, and Charles Fuller. And Charles Fuller had written A Soldier’s Play that Denzel starred in, which that turned into this movie, A Soldier’s Story.
And so I remember Charles Fuller was teaching us about playwriting and he asked us did we know how to write poetry, and most of the students said no, we write plays, and he was like learn how to write a poem. It’s the basic building block of all forms of writing. And I believe that with my heart and soul.