Forrest Gander

"What’s the future of any book publishing? Are most of the major New York publishing houses, as they dump their older editors, also weaning themselves of the literary in order to score bigger markets? 

"Will there be books in fifty years? 

"My son, in his mid-thirties, thinks not. A headline in The New York Times this morning announces A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles with Math. 

"I’m no good with predictions. I’m devoted to something that has value to me, whether or not there is a place for it in our rapidly changing culture. I know others who feel the same way. 

"Maybe the fact that poetry has, for the most part, always existed outside the market economy bodes well for its place in the future. 

"In an interview, Raúl Zurita once said to me, 

Because it is what opposes death, poetry is the hope of what has no hope. It is the possibility of what has absolutely no possibility. It is the love of what has no love. Like death, poetry was born with the human and will die when the last of our kind contemplates the last sunset.

"I think there will always be people who consider poetry —written by people —important [to], even critical to human experience."