Keith Leonard : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

In school, I assumed a poem was something to be broken down and understood completely. But the longer I’ve been out of the classroom, the more I’ve realized that, for me, I care less about understanding a poem and more about listening to a poem. I think those two things are very different. Understanding a poem can sometimes be rooted in the impulse to possess an object; listening to a poem is just being there and being open to what the poem has to say. Reading poetry and writing poetry are both acts of attention—which, for me, takes conscious work. I get distracted easily. But poetry requires a battling of that impulse towards ease. It requires sitting with a page of words that came from another conscious mind as that person attempted to explain or explore.