What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I teach high school students and what I tell them is that poetry tells you the truth about yourself. It will never sell out because you can’t make money off of it and it won’t make you famous. Believe me, I won a National poetry award in Canada early in my career and was “poetry-famous” for like six months which meant I could get a free beer in certain tiny bars in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. Aim higher. Anyways, what poetry does is immediately connects a reader and a poet in a way that gives the reader a little electrical charge. I still feel that tiny zap of understanding thirty years after reading my first poem. I hope that never changes.
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