From Poetry Foundation (Nov. 2011): The Guardian‘s John Harris takes up the subject of poetry in a recent installment of his national conversations series. A little predictably, he begins with the premise that being a poet these days is a thankless task and then illustrates poetry’s marginality via a series of quick interviews with unwitting pedestrians.
But after that he jumps into an interesting and wide-ranging conversation with poet Simon Armitage, who turns this premise on its head, saying that if everybody sitting on the bus or the tube in the mornings was holding a book of poems, he might not want to be a poet at all:
“There’s something about poetry which is oppositional and it’s a form of dissent. I mean, even in its physical form, it doesn’t reach the right-hand margin, it doesn’t reach the bottom of the page. There’s something a little bit obstinate about it […] Poetry’s always had a complex relationship with language. It’s alternative. It’s independent. It simply cannot be a mainstream art form.”
Watch the whole interview right here:
