Category Archives: 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)

Let us remember. . .that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

Christian Wiman, Editor
Poetry Magazine

(note from Poet Laureate: What do you think?)

No, the President didn’t submit the following quote, but he did say it last week at a poetry event he and Michelle held at the White House.

“Everybody experiences it differently. There are no rules for what makes a great poem. Understanding it isn’t just about metaphor or meter. Instead, a great poem is one that resonates with us, that challenges us and that teaches us something about ourselves and the world that we live in. As Rita Dove says, ‘If [poetry] doesn’t affect you on some level that cannot be explained in words, then the poem hasn’t done its job.’ ”

President Obama

Read more about the White House event where Michelle hosted a workshop for young poets, taught by former U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove and Billy Collins, and Obama’s inaugural poet Elizabeth Anderson , at the Huffington Post. You’ll also find a link there to a few poems Obama had published as a college student. Cool.

And send me your favorite. . . pass it on.

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate