One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
I was an English major in college, so I really liked spoken word and poetry; it was what I did before I wrote music.
What’s the function of poetry? It’s to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: ‘Wow, I’ve experienced that, but you’ve expressed it so much better.’
I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that ‘something more’ could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.
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.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.
I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It’s one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, ‘surreal.’
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ‘read,’ commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
I must say, when I reread myself, it’s the poetry I tend to look at. It’s the most exciting to write, and it’s over the quickest.
I’ve done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I’ve compiled a book of poetry that’s completed, and two others I’m working on.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Art history and Elizabethan poetry don’t employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences such as computer programming and accounting does.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
