Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or

When I Applied To Stanford, I Applied For Graduate Work In The Phd Program, Not To The Creative Writing Program, Mostly Because Though I Had Some Vague Ambition Of Becoming A Writer And I Was Trying To Write Poems And Essays And Stories, I Didn't Feel Like I Was Far Enough Along To Submit Work To Some Place And Have It Judged.

The Record Of Poetry In The 20th Century Isn't All That Great Anyway. Most Of The Poets Who Weren't Fascists Were Stalinists.

If You Read Three Books A Day You Couldn't Read All The Poetry That's Being Published.

My Suspicion Is That Once You Have Literacy In Place, The Readership Has Not Changed Very Much.

Prose Gets Divided Up Into Fiction And Nonfiction And Short Fiction And Long Fiction And Autobiographical Nonfiction And So On. Poetry Can Do Any Of Those Things Except With The Added Definition Of Intensified Formal Pressure.