I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
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.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
More modern poetry is written than read.