Jeet Thayil

"I think one very fine way to tell the development of a society is how it treats its poets, its gay people, and its women. And in those three areas, we really are backward. I believe that two generations from today, there may be value placed on all of this. Young people today read poetry, they buy books, they read poetry on the Internet. The Internet has taken poetry out of that academic conversation, which has to happen if poetry's going to live. Say `poetry' and there were a lot of people who were turned off already, who had forgotten that a poetry reading is just a man or a woman speaking to you. Poetry needs to resonate with you if it's going to live. It's human speech, and it's the most beautiful speech, it's elevated in a way we can't have in our normal lives; it contains the best of us." -- Jeet Thayil in conversation with Nilanjana S. Roy for Hindu Literary Review, full story is here