David Yezzi on contemporary American poetry, from a recent interview in MensDaily.com: “A perennial call goes out sounding the decline of poetry, but it seems to me that things are much as they have always been—though where the next Shakespeare is lurking I hardly know. As I’ve said, there’s never very much of the genuine about. One difference in recent decades, however, has been the loss of the tools themselves. Traditional verse technique is no longer required to be a revered poet and well-paid professor of poetry. In fact, quite the opposite is the case; metered verse and rhyme are now seen as clear indications of a poet’s lack of feeling.

Fortunately, poems have always been written in traditional verse, even in the free-verse heyday of the later twentieth century. I suspect they always will be. Good poems are nigh impossible write, and any poet who abandons certain time-tested and powerful tools and techniques (on political or aesthetic grounds) does so at his peril. Formal verse technique is strong medicine—the most precise instrument we have for calibrating shades of meaning and emotion. Doing without it is not just playing tennis with the net down (as Robert Frost said) but playing without a ball.

I’m not opposed to free verse, but I am opposed to those who are reflexively for it to the exclusion of all else.”

Read the full text of “Poetry Amid the Kultursmog”:

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/07/11/poetry-amidst-the-kultursmog-an-interview-with-david-yezzi/

And have a look at my interview with Yezzi from last year:

http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/32/yezzi_i.html