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Perhaps These Are Not Poetic Times At All
Poetry and Los Angeles at the Millennium
In my neighborhood, the guys who deliver pizza come from all over the world, and they tell me that America is the first country they’ve been to where the houses are not full of books. That’s what they tell me when they see all the books I have lying around.
Michael Tolkin, novelist, director and screenwriter: I do read a lot of poetry. I try to keep in mind Edmund Wilson’s dictum that you should read something luminous every night. I’m not that adventurous when it comes to single volumes by new poets. I like the anthologies, like The Best American Poetry, because then someone else has done the work of discovering people for me. Generally I go for the warhorses: Williams, Stevens, Frost, though the Frost I like is the manic-depressive swamp Yankee, not the kindly farmer. I don’t know or read any contemporary L.A. poets. I’ll read whoever gets published in The New Yorker or the London Review of Books or whatever intellectual journals have poetry in them. I don’t know what it is about poetry, but I like it. I like geniuses. In collected works, I’m drawn to the last 15 pages or so. I like seeing what people wrote before they died.
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