I subscribe to The Sun magazine and in the December issue that just arrived the main article is "Kim Rosen on Reclaiming the Ancient Power of Poetry." As I am starting to direct THE BEATS, it is easy to get distracted by the scene, the lifestyle, the culture. But they were, they are, Poets. Poets trying to change the world by changing the conversation. Writers changing the way we write and think through Poetry and Prose. Below are two excerpts from Alison Luterman's interview of Kim Rosen in The Sun, but please go here to read the entire article. Enjoy!

Excerpt One

Rosen: When you attend a symphony, you lean back, close your eyes, and go for the ride. You’re not thinking to yourself, Now, what was Beethoven trying to say with that particular chord? Most of us don’t analyze a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. We stand in front of it and observe what happens in our own bodies and minds.

But with poetry, because it’s words on a page, we think we’re supposed to understand it the way we understand a newspaper article. The left brain says, Aha! This is my domain. It wants a literal meaning to the poem. But poetry is the stuff of the right brain — the ineffable, the emotional, the relational — arriving dressed up in the costume of the left brain: words. Billy Collins has a great poem called 'Introduction to Poetry.' He invites people to "take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide," but all they want to do, he says, is beat it with a hose to "find out what it really means."

Excerpt Two

Luterman: You recently wrote a blog in the Huffington Post about this country’s “metrophobia,” or fear of poetry. Why is American culture so poetry-phobic, whereas other cultures revere poetry and poets?

Rosen: Only a few generations ago in the U.S., poetry was much more popular than it is now. My father, who is ninety, still remembers the John Donne sonnet he memorized in grammar school. Poetry recitation used to be a fixture of small-town American entertainment. But over the last few generations we have managed to marginalize the art form. And it’s not just about the rise of tv, radio, and other technologies taking the place of poetry. Did you know that the most popular tv show in the Middle East is Million’s Poet? It’s like American Idol, but the contestants recite poetry. The show has even inspired a tv channel completely dedicated to poetry, an idea that seems unimaginable in the U.S.

-- Kim Rosen and Alison Luterman discuss Poetry in The Sun December 2010 issue.