DA: I've found your essays on poetic form extraordinarily interesting, and am looking forward with intense anticipation to your full Ars Poetica. It seems to me that your subject matter is not the poem tout court but the lyric poem, and perhaps – if the term ‘lyric’ is understood in a fairly general way – a certain kind of lyric poem only: the unified orchestration of sound, meaning and feeling over a span of no more than, say, twenty or thirty lines (or, in the case of a longer work, sections that have their own unity). If this is so, it would mean that although many of your poems qualify, some do not. What would you claim is the reach of your theorising in these essays?

DP: I think I'm talking about a contemporary default, a category into which about 95 per cent of poems written now seem to fall. A certain kind of poem has emerged which seems to conceive of itself as a single-celled entity, seems to aim for the total interdependence of its parts – even if we know the real poem is a far messier proposition. I'm not sure ‘the poem’ can be defined any better than poetry can, but everyone seems to know what we mean by it. Most of its conventions seem culturally fixed, and some unrevisably so. One can always think of exceptions, but they remain just that. And half the time the ‘exceptions’ to this kind of poem are really just what we'd call ‘verse’, verse being a set of parallel rules you might subject any form of speech to, poetic or not – whereas real poetic speech tends to generate those rules almost as a by-product of its own concentrated rhetoric. But I think at fifty lines or less, the poem can be ‘spatialised’ through its rereading; longer than that, it yawns towards more of a litanical or narrative exercise. That's to say its elements can no longer be retained in the mind in a way that forms a kind of gestalt, and it moves from a project where elements are connected in parallel to one where they're connected in series. Nonetheless I think certain principles still hold when you consider any short passage of genuinely poetic speech, regardless of the length of the poem it's been excerpted from.