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Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it’s timeless, that it reaches back.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
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.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can’t define it.
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.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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.