I use poetry to explain myself to myself. It is a way of investigating who you really are, what you feel, what survives the pressure of writing. There are a lot of things that you can't write down because they aren't true. You can only put down what holds water at the time that you are doing it.
Jonathan W. GalassiItalian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.
Jonathan W. GalassiThere is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the history of literature, poetry is the one enduring genre from Homer to Ashbery - no other literary form has lasted as long. The novel is only two or three hundred years old... And yes, it's mainstream if we look back, we often turn to poetry to encapsulate what was going on in a particular moment because it crystalizes the experience in a very condensed and meaningful way.
Jonathan W. GalassiIdentity is the continuity in a personality that survives through various vicissitudes, through change.
Jonathan W. GalassiI think that my early poems were probably more concerned with time passing because of unfulfilled desires or yearnings. Now, I feel younger than I felt when I was a young old man. Now I want to live as long as I can.
Jonathan W. GalassiIf you're reading an exciting book, it raises an expectation but it also raises a fear that the author is not going to deliver, that the expectation is not going to be met, you're going to be disappointed by a wrong turn. But when the thing is completed, the exhilaration and gratitude are deeply intense. You've gotten to read a great thing at its moment of emergence.
Jonathan W. Galassi