The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.
I've always thought my poems told stories.
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
I'm a great lover of ballads.
The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.
