My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

The more poetry you have in the head the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

I see people who talk about America and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul to its poetry. I see polarization reductionism and superficiality.

On the other hand if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.