The Poetry of Other Things

This month, over at Poetry, poets are sharing their love of … other things. Jill Alexandra Essbaum and lawn-mowing, Michael Robbins and his cat.* But, perhaps most enjoyably, Robin Schiff and soap operas:

As contrived as the twists can seem, there is something beautifully improvisational about the form. Plotlines run concurrently in a perpetually open narrative, and soaps not only operate with no end in sight, but also without a clear origin, because the past has as many possibilities as the future. Even if a plotline seems to achieve closure, narrative satisfaction is temporary at best, qualified by the soap opera rule of return through which characters come back from dark pasts dreamt up in the present. For instance, Hope’s son was killed in a motor vehicle accident by the daughter her husband conceived sixteen years earlier, unbeknownst to anyone, even the writers then, during the years Hope was presumed dead. The art, it seems, is to throw open a few windows as you go so they can be crawled through later. The term “Hell mouth” is sometimes used to refer to trapdoors in a theater, and it seems like a fitting term to describe the multi-generational revolving doors through which soap characters come and go past-ward into the future.

*We guess there are poets who don’t have cats, but have never met one.