I’ve thought a lot about this question because, though I’m hardly leading the escapist life of Calvino’s Reader, I too am a Reader of sorts: Reader for this magazine. As such, I see an enormous quantity of work by poets who are hoping for publication. Ironically, it often seems that it’s an inability to get past one’s own experience that causes many of these poems to founder. For the beginner, it’s the rather narcissistic belief that, to switch Ashbery a bit, “whatever melodramatic happens to you/Is OK.” But even in certain, yes, more experienced poets, there can be an impulse around the anecdotal—around travel, around the family, around “events”—that, if not reworked in what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called the “internal expansion” of the poem, burns as the steady flame of ordinariness. 

What’s missing in much of the work I see is an ability to distinguish experience from occasion: what I’ll define here as the prime mover of the poem, be it based in the poet’s empirical life, in imagination, in the jurr of language, in literary texts. Yes, it can even be anecdotal, as in the infamous “I placed a jar in Tennessee.” It’s the opening, the antechamber of the poem that invites us into the occasion that will, we hope, master us as readers. 

—Christina Pugh on reading poets who want, so much, to be in Poetry