A Quote by Peter Davison
I like poems that are complex.
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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
I'm always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for many different emotions.
There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm taking dictation from my own dream that I don't remember.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
A lot of the time, unfortunately for women, there's not a lot of complex roles. I don't mean complex like tortured or whatever. I mean complex like there's more going on with them than, 'I'm a mom.'
I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.
If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.
I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.
I like to read a lot of books and poems. Even though poems are short, I enjoy the emotions that come with them.
My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.
When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They're not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be "real."
I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.
However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
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