News at Eleven: Maybe there's a suspicion,

alongside this, that the ideal world is sort of there, if we can only meet it halfway. Poetry is, I think, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of speech that closes down the possibility of such a meeting, an attempt to keep oneself open linguistically and sensually and imaginatively to the world as it is, rather than using it as a movie screen for received ideas and second-rate wishes. Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it--and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet's task is to suggest that it needn't be.

from Granta: Interview: John Burnside

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