Annotations for Creative Process: Poetry

Yes. And Betty, of course, lived for the poetry world and was, in a way, queen of all of it. She had an understanding of the need for poetry in our culture. And I've never met anyone like her in her efficiency about making that understanding public property. She could convince anyone to give a hundred thousand dollars the next day for the promotion of poetry as part of our American culture.

And she didn't have a name for it and I said it's not to be called a library. It should be called a, it should be called Poets House. And without an apostrophe because nobody owns poetry. It belongs to civilization. That was it.

Let me ask a silly question. Why do we need poetry?

Why do we need poetry? Because every great civilization has demonstrated the need for myth and poetry in the effectiveness of the state itself beyond power, beyond military strength, beyond commerce. What a great civilization needs to demonstrate is the power of what it stands for in terms of human dignity and freedom. And the word, the myth, is essential to the survival of civilization, and to the culmination of its powers. I think anyone who studies history would have to agree to that.

I mean, you say poetry you mean poetry. Not poetry in the sense of fiction being poetic, or anything else.

No, I mean poetry in the largest sense as a spiritual force. And I equate it with myth in that. Poetry and myth. The myth of a culture, the myth of a civilization, is what perpetuates the state as a state and as a power in the world.

It's usually a phrase, an image. It's a rhythm more than anything else. And I've always felt that poetry begins with sounds rather than with sense. And you ride on that rhythm until your own being takes possession of it. And really, the sound and the sense combine and then you have some sense of where you're going, aside from riding on that rhythm. But, to a large degree, I think the poem is more interested in perpetuating a flow of sound than it is of producing a meaning.