And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Peter Davison

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
Peter Davison

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
Peter Davison

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.
Peter Davison

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
Peter Davison

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
Peter Davison

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.
Peter Davison

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
Peter Davison

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.
Peter Davison

I like poems that are complex.
Peter Davison


I like poems that are little games.
Peter Davison

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Peter Davison

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.
Peter Davison

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.
Peter Davison

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
Peter Davison

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.
Peter Davison

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.
Peter Davison

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Peter Davison

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.
Peter Davison

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
Peter Davison