THE LAST OF THE BATCH
The art that dare not speak its name..?
'The trouble with love poems is that the emotion reflects too much credit on the poet.'
— Anthony Cronin, The Sunday Independent, 22 February 2004
'People want something or think that you can be useful to them. If you're a poet, you're no good to anybody.'
— Roger McGough, The Independent, 28 November 2003
'When asked what I do, I try just to say I'm a writer, because telling people you're a poet compels them to go into nervous detail about why they neither read nor understand it.'
— Lavinia Greenlaw, The Guardian, 20 December 2003
'It's a life's work to write poetry. So, for anybody to say "Oh yes, I'm a poet" suggests you should be dead by now, you're finished!'
— John F Deane, RTE Radio I, January 2004
'I'm embarrassed to tell people, still, that I'm a poet... because I don't like poets. They're creeps. Some of my best friends are poets, but they're adult children, almost without exception. And the level of self-involvement is such that it's really a wonder, when they're stationary, the floorboards don't give way.'
— August Kleinzahler, Poets & Writers On-Line, October 2003
'I'm still embarrassed to say I'm a poet. I say I'm a writer and sometimes I say I work for the Inland Revenue, which kills the conversation. To say you're a poet is even worse.'
— Don Paterson, The Independent, 9 January 2004
'We do not, on the whole, want our poets to be cuddly and approachable. We don't want to think of them buying toilet rolls at Tesco or filling out their tax returns. We want our poets to be brooding, Byronic, beautiful and preferably dead.'
— Christina Patterson, The Independent, 6 February 2004
'I can pick a poet out a mile away: the greying hair, buttery complexion, rustic clothes, sheaf of papers and a book under one arm, the fag and doughnut in Bewleys for tea.'
— Brighid MacLaughlin, The Sunday Independent, 22 February 2004
'A lot of people have peculiar ideas about what a poet is. They imagine someone very emotional, perhaps sentimental, nostalgic — someone whose writing reflects their own personal experience, someone who is subject to bouts of melancholia.'
— Timothy Donnelly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 January 2004
'Unlike other work, being a poet is a culturally demeaned occupation. It's not the kind of thing I'd use as a pick-up line. Saying you're a famous poet is tantamount to saying you're a famous croquet player.'
— Christian Bök, Toronto Star, 3 January 2004
This curious but uplifting tale comes via Jilly Dybka’s excellent poetry blog, Poetry Hut..
FIGHTING THE TSUNAMI WITH POETRY
Port Blair, January 04, 2005 9:35:24 AM IST
When Sadhan Neogi feels too depressed about the killer tsunami smashing through his beloved Andaman and Nicobar islands, he turns to verse.
"I was on the beach/Dreaming of my castles/When the sands shifted/The waves rose/Hideous/Crashing on the vessels," Neogi read his Bengali poetry to IANS.
"It is only when I write that I can come to terms with what happened," said Neogi, who works as a part-time mechanic and handyman.
Three of Neogi's dearest friends were killed when tidal waves rose across the shores of the archipelago made up of 572 islands, islets and rocks.
"They had gone boating," said Neogi, who speaks little and writes a lot these days. "They never returned."
More than 800 people have died, according to official figures, and thousands missing in the tsunami attack that ravaged islands across the Andamans, wiping out entire towns in some.
Neogi said that the friends he lost were, almost, the only friends he ever had.
"I grew up with them, went to school together, played together, ate together. They were like brothers to me."
One of them even got him interested in poetry.
"You see, I was never the literary kind. I was more like cricket and wrestling in the mud and football in the rain-type. But then, one day, one of my friends was reading (Rabindranath) Tagore, and I happened to peep, trying to see what he was reading. It was Geetanjali (Tagore's epic collection of poems). He insisted that I read it too, almost stuffed the book in my bag.
"That's when it all started. I became a bigger poetry lover than he. It was I got immersed in this world of Tagore. I loved it," said Neogi, his wavy black hair falling in an unruly heap over his eyebrows.
"It was the same friend who read the very first poem that I wrote," said Neogi, his eyes reddening at the edges. "I wrote, 'The sea calls/Every night/And like eyes swim/Searching for the light.' He hated it. Actually they all did.
"They said I was a horrible poet. Rabindranath must be turning in his grave. And then on his last birthday, I gave him a poem. It was also about the sea. He had framed it."
9:47:48 PM 
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