I Wish Someone Had Told Me That

For Many Years, I Thought A Poem Was A Whisper Overheard, Not An Aria Heard.

My First Advice Would Be To Read, Read, Read, Which Sounds Interesting Coming In A Digital Age, But It's So Much Easier To Listen To A Poem Than It Is To Sit Down And Actually Read It And To Hear It In Your Head And That Is Something That Every Poet Or Aspiring Poet Needs To Be Able To Do, I Think To Hear It In Their Head.

People Write Me From All Over The Country, Asking Me, And Sometimes Even Telling Me, What They Think A Poet Laureate Should Do. I Found That Immensely Valuable.

If We Really Want To Be Full And Generous In Spirit, We Have No Choice But To Trust At Some Level.

We Tend To Be So Bombarded With Information, And We Move So Quickly, That There's A Tendency To Treat Everything On The Surface Level And Process Things Quickly. This Is Antithetical To The Kind Of Openness And Perception You Have To Have To Be Receptive To Poetry.poetry Seems To Exist In A Parallel Universe Outside Daily Life In America.