“I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2, 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.”
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When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.