Poetry According to Kowit

What a humbling experience it was to dialog with nationally-known poet Steve Kowit! He talked with our writers' group last night on a wide range of aspects of poetry. First he read one of his own poems and casually mentioned that Ginsberg (the late, great Allen, the Beat poet) told him he'd riffed on it, just as Kowit had written it based on one of Pablo Neruda's poems, "Enigma". What a web of connections poets weave! I knew we prose writers rip off one another (there are only so many topics and a set number of facts to use), but it had never occurred to me that each poem was not individual.

Kowit mentioned he's a reactionary. I asked him to elaborate. He said he's rebelling against modernism and post-modernistic poetry with all its vague incomprehensibility. "That has lost poetry readers," he declared, explaining that he wants his poems to be accessible (understandable) to everyone. While discussing the "meaning" of a poem he'd read aloud, I floated the notion that a poem means what it means to the reader. He gently rejected this idea, declaring that poetry is communication, so there must be a message and it is the poets job to make the message clear. I still wonder about ye who have ears.