I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.
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