And I watch my friends, most of whom are in academic life because most poets have to be in academic life, there aren't so many other ways to survive. |
And one of the odd things about it is that poetry is now fleeing from the academies to another institution, which is the performance poetry. |
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet. |
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. |
But nobody can write poetry all the time. |
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets. |
However, in 1950 there might have been 150 books of poetry published in a year. In 1997, there are probably about 1,500. |
I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant. |
I like poems that are complex. |
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry. |