[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

Take Michael. Now, Michael knows full well that if you run into a poet who has "something to say," the best thing to do is to run in the other direction. As the cliche goes, people who have "something to say" should be writing essays, people who just love the sound of things should be poets. It's an overstatement, of course, but it has at least a crust of truth.

No Bill, that is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all.

What I say is that if you are writing a "message" poem - a strong political or religious or philosophical statement, for example - you had dammed well better say it very well, or it will come across as a lecture, a rant, a simplification. I have never limited poetry to simply "the sound of things", and I certainly don't do that with my own. I just try to write it well enough (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) so that it sounds like something more than a spittle-spattered message. (Unless I'm deliberately trying to sound like a nut for the purposes of the poem - then the spittle is deliberate.)