humility

There was a heat haze over Canterbury, possibly the first of the season. In the Peter Brown Room (shouldn’t it be the Pete Brown Room) at the University of Kent, Peter Gizzi discussed the strange business of poetry and read from his most recent book Threshold Songs (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). It’s always refreshing to hear someone talk about poetry who isn’t trying to hammer a credo into your consciousness (when this happens the credo usually manages to place its author at the centre of things). I thought Gizzi got it about right. I would probably disagree with a fine point or two but I think he managed pretty well to balance a sense of the place of poetry with a degree of humility.