I'm not a big fan of poetry.
That is to say, poetry has to be particularly fine to draw me in. I like Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I like T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land. I like Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus". I guess what I'm getting at here is that I like rather literary, somewhat complex poetry, though I do have a New Jersey loyalty to William Carlos Williams and, of course, Bruce Springsteen (so he sings his poems. They're poems. That are stories. More on this another time.) Poems tell stories in fewer words and fewer pages, poets loading all the power that they can into each phrase, and every chosen word, and there's a certain magic in that.
