If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.