Sally Ito : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I have always been an image driven poet, so I had little capacity and interest in developing the musical side of poetry in terms of rhythm, rhyme, meter.  I also was a poet of the page; in other words, I felt poetry was something you wrote that someone read silently to themselves on the page.  Now, I think more ‘three-dimensionally’ about poetry – it’s still all about words – but ‘words’ spoken, performed, read, sung, translated.  This wider understanding of the ‘word’ has expanded my view of poetry since I began writing it.