THERE is a good chance that you have read something published by Jonathan Galassi. One of the wunderkinds of the New York editing and publishing world, at age 30 he was the head of Houghton Mifflin Company. He moved to Random House and then to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is now president, and he was also the poetry editor of the Paris Review for a decade. Alongside nurturing contemporary poetry and new American writers, he is a poet himself and a translator of Eugenio Montale, a late Italian author.Publishing has changed a lot because of the ways books are delivered to the reader. Not so much with poetry so far, because e-books are not hospitable to poetry yet, though it will unquestionably happen. But I don't think the actual editing of books has changed much at all. I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems—close reading—can carry over into how you read other things. I guess I see it as all one thing: whether you're working with someone on his or her book, translating someone else, or trying to write yourself. For me, one thing flows into another. And I find translating very invigorating. It's fun to exercise your instrument that way.I had both of them as teachers at Harvard. Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.I remember feeling how oddly unrelated British and American poets were in the '70s. At the "high" end, there's more interchange—we read Seamus Heaney ; some people here read Geoffrey Hill . You read Robert Lowell , or even John Ashbery in certain quarters. But in the middle it sometimes feels that there's almost no connection. I remember going to hear poets like Lee Harwood read, sort of British “New York School” poets, in London when I was a student. They were very much on the outer edge of experimentalism in Britain. As students, of course, we would read David Jones and people who had historical relevance, and Philip Larkin was still alive then, who was very great. I remember being totally overwhelmed reading "The Whitsun Weddings" on a train in England. But a lot of the "everyday" poets don't really speak to each other. It's almost as if they are reading each other through a glass darkly. I think that's particularly true of the Britons reading American poets.In my day, everyone wanted to write like Lowell (how times change!). A lot of major American poets like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery went to Harvard, too, but I don't think that amounted to a “Harvard School”. They were New York School. They got away from Harvard as fast as possible; and they hated Robert Lowell, his patrician, masculinist self-assurance.Poets have said, with great justice, that the only reason to write a poem is that you can't not write it. And many have also said that it is the non-commercial aspect of poetry that gives it its special integrity. It's also probably one reason why there is so much jealousy among poets. As Henry Kissinger put it, the reason there's so much squabbling in academia is that there is so little at stake. But I do think that poetry is only about itself, only about experiencing the world and making something out of that "lover's quarrel" that is very personal—and paradoxically also universal. And there is the guild of poets who understand each other—they may not like the way the others do it, but they all have the same "angle of attention" to the universe. So there's a sense of solidarity among them. And they probably love the fact that the world doesn't pay them enough attention, that what they do is their secret in a way. They must choose that in some way.The "situation" of poetry is one of those perennial issues that will never really be resolved. Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular "problem". Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant? One of the ways you can judge the enduring relevance of poetry is how often it's quoted to make sense of a particular time. Look at Wilfred Owen and the way we think about the first world war, or how Eliot or Auden are quoted to sum up their age. This betrays the deep importance of poetry, and the way it gets absorbed into the marrow of the culture.Poetry has a vital place in society, whether it's granted one or not. It exists; it is something people perversely do. Whether it gets formal acknowledgment or is provided an established role is really not the ultimate point. There's a lot of energy and money spent on trying to make a place for poetry in society; I'm all for it, and I work on this myself in various ways. But I don't think it has anything to do with the art. Poetry is anti-establishment by nature—except when it's not, of course, and then it tends to be of little interest. True poetry gets absorbed ex post facto, when people understand that the poet is seeing something, knows something, that they didn't. And that is the poet's ultimate reward: to change perception, to enter the language, to matter. There's nothing more mainstream than that. And it's something you can't buy, can't force. It just happens.