The Mallarme poem that begins, "The virginal, enduring, beautiful today..."

When I see poetry which is real poetry, rarely as there is so little of it, as it should be, real poetry being so rare as to almost not exist, I know it's real the moment I see it.

I keep a folder of real poems I have either copied by hand or on the word processor, or photographed on my iPhone and reproduced, or clipped from a newspaper or magazine. They're all written by other people, poets other than myself, and each one of the poems in the folder fulfills the requirement I've made that a poem be real in the only way it can be real for me; that is, it is so rare as to almost not exist. (What did George Oppen say? That a poem that's actually a poem could only have been that poem).

I've been collecting real poems for about five years now and putting them into the folder. There are 32 of them now. Denise Levertov has a poem in there, as does John Donne. No one poet has two poems in the folder, though it's possible one poet could end up with multiple entries as I'm open to adding real poems to the collection should I come across them.

As a publisher I've often thought of publishing a book of real poems, an anthology of sorts, but poetry is a difficult, unsellable genre and all the legalities--collecting the copyright permissions etc. etc.-- are daunting.

As a writer, having written poems, some of them real and some of them not, I'd never think of including one of my poems in a book made of poems by other people. It's not that I have problems with self-publishing, having
overcome that problem some time ago, rather it's the false modesty of choosing not to be in a book titled, "Real Poems by Other
People", an attempt to honor my original conception.