For instance, it’s a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative. – Peter Davison
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet. – Peter Davison
But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way. – Peter Davison
The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn’t the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it. – Peter Davison
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. – Peter Davison
In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren’t ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them. – Peter Davison
The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product. – Peter Davison
It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities. – Peter Davison
The trouble with the performance poets is that they don’t seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work. – Peter Davison
I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant. – Peter Davison
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding. – Peter Davison
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers. – Peter Davison
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. – Peter Davison
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such. – Peter Davison
But for me, being an editor I’ve been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most. – Peter Davison
In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read. – Peter Davison
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry. – Peter Davison
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they’re embarrassed that I write it or they’re embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence. – Peter Davison
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. – Peter Davison
