There is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the … - Jonathan W. Galassi

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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

Jonathan W. Galassi

There is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the history of literature, poetry is the one enduring genre from Homer to Ashbery - no other literary form has lasted as long. The novel is only two or three hundred years old. . . And yes, it's mainstream if we look back, we often turn to poetry to encapsulate what was going on in a particular moment because it crystalizes the experience in a very condensed and meaningful way.

Ashbery, Crystalizes, Democracy, Literary, Long, Meaningful

Same Author Quotes

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be. I thought I'd try it, and I'm still trying it, 40 years later.

Fun, Literature, Living, Thinking, Writing

We need prizes as publishers. . . to focus attention on books, for people to know what to go look for. But often in my opinion and in probably everyone's opinion, the right books don't get chosen. Still we need books to be chosen even if they are not exactly the right ones, otherwise many people won't know what to read. As a publisher, I feel prizes are important for the publishing business. But as a writer, I think, writers shouldn't get too distracted by prizes because very often they don't go to the right person. You shouldn't take it too seriously if you haven't won a prize.

Attention, Book, People, Publishers, Thinking

If you're reading an exciting book, it raises an expectation but it also raises a fear that the author is not going to deliver, that the expectation is not going to be met, you're going to be disappointed by a wrong turn. But when the thing is completed, the exhilaration and gratitude are deeply intense. You've gotten to read a great thing at its moment of emergence.

Book, Deliver, Fear, Gratitude, Moment, Reading

Poetry is an ongoing conversation with the past and the future and the present. I'm interested in that continuity, in that way of tying civilization together. It's like shoe laces, it holds things together.

Conversation, Ongoing, Past, Poetry Is, Present, Together

I'm old-fashioned enough to really still believe that the poem is an object to be memorized, venerated. . . I still believe in that kind of poem. A lot of poets today don't, they want to get away from the poem as object. They want something looser. Unfortunately, a lot of it is boring to me.

Believe, Kind, Object, Today, Unfortunately