3 December 2020 Paul Valery In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
3 December 2020 Martin C. Smith I’ve got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
3 December 2020 Raoul Vaneigem The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
3 December 2020 Knut Hamsun I have had much to learn from Sweden’s poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
3 December 2020 Eugenio Montale Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
3 December 2020 Roger McGough If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there – not because you’ve done a comedy performance but because you’re talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
3 December 2020 Story Musgrave I’ve already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
3 December 2020 Azar Nafisi America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
3 December 2020 Louise Jameson I’m hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career – they are so fun and witty.
3 December 2020 David Lehman Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
3 December 2020 Juan Goytisolo In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
3 December 2020 Adrian Mitchell Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.
3 December 2020 Marilyn Hacker Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
3 December 2020 Nicholson Baker When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
3 December 2020 James Laughlin I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
3 December 2020 John Ashbery There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
3 December 2020 Mary Oliver Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.
3 December 2020 John Barton Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
3 December 2020 Don Marquis Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
3 December 2020 Story Musgrave Poetry is its own medium it’s very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
3 December 2020 Marilyn Hacker Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
