The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
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.
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
We don’t know a tenth of what there is to know, Mr. Pendergast said. Why we don’t even know a sixth.
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.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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