I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
Somebody once said I had a face for radio and a voice for newspapers.
I believe that poetry should communicate.
The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.