There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.