Kay Ryan: On poetry

I never, ever worry about poetry or its survival because it’s the very nature of a poem to be that language that does survive. Poems are even better than tweets–they don’t require any electronic equipment. They can lodge right in your brain. They are by nature short. You don’t even have to remember all of them–you can remember just a phrase. That can be something you can turn to in any emergency, good or bad. You’ll pluck out a little group of words, just maybe a phrase, and that’s exactly what poetry is for. It’s for the things that really last. Because it lasts.

Kay Ryan, former U.S. Poet Laureate
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 2011, for The Best of It
(from an interview in The Wall Street Journal online)