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.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Peter Davison

I like poems that are little games.

Peter Davison

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Peter Davison

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Peter Davison

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

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.

Peter Davison

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Peter Davison

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.

Peter Davison

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

Peter Davison

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Peter Davison

I like poems that are complex.

Peter Davison