I recently met a few poets who hinted that they’ve lost the spirit of poetry. One writes short pieces, another a sort of epigram. A third has stopped writing literature. I find it hard to decide whether this situation threatens to paralyze me: suddenly you want to breathe through the straw of cropped lines but it’s blocked and you choke, or else you feel a sense of infinite release. You no longer have to listen to these rhythms that arrive from afar and approach slowly until they become poems and the words begin to squeeze through and add up together into musical energy on the page that also has meaning and makes a statement about your life and your death, about what you’ve lost, the paths you’ve crossed and where you’ve erred.