Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
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