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My later poems

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What is a poem?
WD Snodgrass Poet
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I have thought about what a poem is, and it seems to me that it's a crystallization of… of one particular brain which preserves the qualities of that brain. I mean, and… and if it's a good poem, you read it, and you know it's Bobby Burns. Or you know it's Shakespeare. Or you know it's Sir Phillip Sidney. You know it's Pope. Because certain… certain qualities of mind have been crystallized there. And it allows another person to identify, to broaden their own mind by identifying with your brain's limits and possibilities and so forth.

American poet WD Snodgrass, entered the world of poetry with a bang winning several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for his first collection of poetry, Heart's Needle. A backlash followed his controversial fifth anthology “The Fuehrer Bunker”, but in recent years these poems have been reassessed and their importance recognised.

Listeners: William B. Patrick

William B. Patrick is a writer and poet who lives in Troy, New York. Among his work are the poetry volumes "We Didn't Come Here for This" and "These Upraised Hands", the novel "Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family" and the plays "Rescue" and "Rachel's Dinner". His most recent work is the non-fiction book "Saving Troy", based on the year he spent following the Troy Fire Department.

Mr. Patrick has been Writer-in-Residence at the New York State Writers Institute and has taught at Old Dominion University, Onondaga Community College, and Salem State College, and workshops in Screenwriting and Playwriting at the Blue Ridge Writers Conference in Roanoke, Virginia. He has received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Tags: Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope

Duration: 47 seconds

Date story recorded: August 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008