Menu
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.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.
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.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.