It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).
Category Archive: 1923
I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
I exist only in the past.
At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That’s what writing is all about.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life’s wisdom.
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.