3 December 2020 Erica Jong Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life – when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
3 December 2020 Ray Manzarek I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
3 December 2020 Basil Bunting The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
3 December 2020 Paul Auster I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
3 December 2020 Gustave Flaubert Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
3 December 2020 Bruce Cockburn I’d always loved poetry and I’d always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn’t thought of putting the two together until around that time.
3 December 2020 Norman MacCaig I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
3 December 2020 Merritt Wever I used to joke that if acting didn’t work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
3 December 2020 Jim Morrison If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
3 December 2020 Robert Adamson Well – I started writing – probably in the early 60s and by say ’65-’66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published – certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
3 December 2020 Tomas Transtromer Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place – the place of our separation, our distinction – that much of his poetry occupies.
3 December 2020 Marilyn Hacker I have experienced healing through other writers’ poetry, but there’s no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I’ll write a bad poem.
3 December 2020 Anthony Hope I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
3 December 2020 William Butler Yeats We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
3 December 2020 Tom Glazer I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
3 December 2020 Lascelles Abercrombie If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
3 December 2020 Isaac Rosenberg I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
