on poetry…

“One of the ways I’m thinking more and more these days about poetry is poetry as architecture or poetry as structural engineering. Where we take this force and that force and pit them against each other. In buildings, as in poems, there’s a tendency for that feature over there on the right-hand side to echo that feature over there on the left, and it may have to do with aesthetics, of course, but it’s more likely to have to do with pure physics. That’s to say, if you don’t have that balance then the whole thing is going to fall down. I find thinking in these ways quite useful when I’m building poems. They’re bridges. Skyscrapers. And they’re very carefully built, very slowly built. I rely on stepping out into the unknown, of course. But I’m also relying on some basic laws of physics. And maybe chemistry.”

Paul Muldoon, from “Paul Muldoon, The Art of Poetry No. 87,” an interview by James S. F. Wilson, Paris Review
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Photo by Pieter M. van Hattem