It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?

I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.

It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?

Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected.

Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing?

I think it is our job as poets to refuse the terms that society so often sets for usefulness. That, for instance, is what Dickinson did: she refused to be a wife, a homemaker, a standard member of her community. She knew she had to in order to have the space and time to write her poems. Thank god she said no!

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.