I think that when people hear the word “books” or “novels,” they automatically think of fiction. Fiction is such a huge, prevalent literary genre. It’s really on the forefront of the literary world at the moment; people see fiction writing as getting the big bucks.
So I really think that fiction is associated with prose.
Yet fiction isn’t associated nearly as much with poetry. When people hear the word “poetry,” I think most of them think of something that comes from the heart. And poetry does come from the heart. It’s such an artistic expression of human desires and emotions, but since people see it as coming from the heart, they also see it as having to be realistic and nonfiction, maybe because they think poets can only write in a heartfelt way if they’ve experienced their subjects.
I don’t think that a lot of people understand that you can write from the heart without writing about events that have actually happened to you. Emotion isn’t always strictly connected to direct experiences.
For example, if a poet has a friend of a friend whose mother dies of cancer, that poet can still feel grief and loss and sadness because they know that this friend of a friend lost someone dear to them. So this poet can write about that cancer experience in a heartfelt way without actually directly experiencing it him or herself.
And I really don’t think that people who haven’t written poetry understand that. I think that idea, that poets can write about things that they haven’t experienced personally, is foreign to them. It all boils down to this: it’s hard for people to realize it’s possible to feel something that’s happened to someone else as acutely as if it happened to those people themselves.
As Nikki Giovanni said, “Writers don’t write from experience. Writers write from empathy.”