3 December 2020 Helen Dunmore Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
3 December 2020 Mary Gordon It was actually a women’s writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don’t care that’s what poetry is supposed to do.
3 December 2020 Caroline Kennedy The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can’t understand it or that it will be boring.
3 December 2020 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
3 December 2020 James Broughton In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
3 December 2020 Helen Thomas There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred – by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.
3 December 2020 Ezra Pound And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
3 December 2020 Louis Kronenberger The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
3 December 2020 Lafcadio Hearn Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
3 December 2020 Thom Gunn There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
3 December 2020 Harry Mathews Well, I had this little notion – I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.
3 December 2020 Shelby Foote I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of – I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
3 December 2020 Anne Stevenson Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
3 December 2020 Marcus Mumford I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it’s understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don’t have a clue what they’re on about.
3 December 2020 Carl Sandburg Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
3 December 2020 Adrian Mitchell I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock’n roll.
3 December 2020 Charles Olson You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.
3 December 2020 Thomas Hardy Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
3 December 2020 Phyllis Gotlieb You don’t go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.
3 December 2020 Tom Holt Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I’ve managed to grow out of.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
3 December 2020 Erica Jong Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
3 December 2020 William Collins Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don’t call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
