Age-old poetry

Poet Charles Simic, in the New York Review of Books: "Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again … opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same."