Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
From Robert Morgan
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
10 perspectives
9 perspectives
8 perspectives
7 perspectives
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives