If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
I like poems that are little games.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.
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.
