Author Description

I don’t take the poetry personally; it comes from me, of course, but it has its own agenda and my poems often tell me things about myself I wouldn’t have imagined—or imagined I could imagine, to be more precise. And, indeed, often I’m not sure it really IS about me. In any case, the fact is, to be good, for me, the poem has to do that. Surprise me in some way; make me consider the “me” it’s coming from is unknowable to ME, as Philip Ramp, or anyone else for that matter in any other way other than poetry…To a poet, the world is so immense and unpredictable it is both extremely old and new at one and the same time. This may be true of the other arts but words are the most human of all things and the mind uses them to explore all the potentials of this world and those “other ones”—something like string theory and its “landscapes” but poems, while imagined places, are also places WE ARE LIVING IN. - Philip Ramp