Jay Parini

Jay Parini talking to Ramona Koval on Radio National Book Show

"... it was kind of transformative for me because I think I had grown a little cynical about poetry at times and had forgotten how important it is on the most gut-basic level how this language can really tighten our grip on experience and give us a kind of purchase on the world and help us to think about choices and things we do.

                                                 

... there's hardly a day of my life that some lines of poetry don't come into my head and kind of inform some aspect of my experience in that day  ...  without these concrete images we're walking around in a kind of nebulous world. I don't feel rooted unless I've been writing and reading poetry in the morning. For 40 years now, I get up in the morning ... go to a local cafe and I'd begin my day always ... by reading a poem."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/jay-parini-on-why-poetry-matters/3195782