I’m not trying to make kids love poetry, in fact I want them to hate poetry less than most Americans do. Most Americans really hate poetry. We’re maybe the only country in the world, we are the one country in the world who has less interest in poetry than anyone else.
I go to Russia so often, and my friends are just average Russian citizens and they can recite reams of poetry, Pushkin, Lermontov and other great Russian poets, you go out in the street here and ask somebody a couplet and it would be hard for us to do it. I’m not saying everybody should love poetry, in fact when I leave a school if I have reached three or four students out of a school of four hundred, I feel that I’ve succeeded.
Encouraging them to follow poetry for maybe the better part of their lives.
