For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
More modern poetry is written than read.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.