Virtually every dream example I call up out of my poems teeters on the border between life and death, this seems quite apt to me, for I feel that poetry is essentially elegiac in its nature. We hold hard to those we love even as they die away from us and we continue to pursue them, through dreams into poems.
—Maxine Kiumin, Always Beginning
Well, this took forever to get posted, again due to my a desire to say something about the list. Here's the short version: author jags (Gilbert, Glück), recommendations (Kelly, Hall, Smith, Gerstler), class reading (Ackerson-Kiely, Wright) and sheer good luck (David Hernandez, whom I discovered through the wonderful AGNI Online). I'm starting to understand better what most appeals to me, and also where my tastes are starting to stretch (at least a little).
So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
—Jeanette Winterson, in "Shafts of Sunlight, in The Guardian
