3 December 2020 Shelby Foote I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
3 December 2020 John Muir The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
3 December 2020 George Oppen Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
3 December 2020 Lucille Clifton People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski I think that’s what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
3 December 2020 Philip Levine Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.
3 December 2020 Adrian Mitchell Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
3 December 2020 Tahar Ben Jelloun Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare – and precious as a pearl.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
3 December 2020 Robert Adamson There’s one of my new poems actually – is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
3 December 2020 Leonard Cohen I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others it’s for others to use.
3 December 2020 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
3 December 2020 Andrew Motion Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there’s been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
3 December 2020 Eugenio Montale There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
3 December 2020 A. R. Ammons That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
3 December 2020 Jim Morrison Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
3 December 2020 Norman MacCaig However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
3 December 2020 Philip Levine I realized poetry’s the thing that I can do ’cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
3 December 2020 Azar Nafisi I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
3 December 2020 Seamus Heaney The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
3 December 2020 James Laughlin Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.
3 December 2020 Jack Prelutsky Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
