I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art and American poetry is not excluded from this.

I had art as a major along with English French and History. I had dance modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry which I eventually got published.

From my music training I knew that some Spanish rhythms apart 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things which ponders listens penetrates where the earlier less developed consciousness passed lightly by is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French more than English.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.