They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
Peter Davison
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.
If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
I like poems that are little games.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.
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.
It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.
The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
I like poems that are complex.
In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.
In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.
But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.
