People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves.
Joan LarkinI'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.
Joan LarkinMy books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both.
Joan LarkinThere are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.
Joan Larkin