PETER DAVISON

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

I like poems that are little games.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

I like poems that are complex.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.