Bronwyn Lea is Poet of the Month
Which poets have most influenced you?
I first fell for the British Romantics: Keats for his sensitivity, and Byron for his humour, both qualities I try to exercise in my own work. Otherwise it’s the Americans of last century: the Moderns, Stevens in particular, and later the West Coast poets. I like to find these poets thinking (and sometimes running) in my poems.
Are poems chiefly ‘inspired’ or crafted?
The grit for a poem is found inside the poetic experience – a state of mind marked by sustained focus and deep immersion in a subject – and later crafted into an object of art. Paradoxically, a poem is nothing without craft, yet its craft must be made to look like nothing.
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