3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski I’m perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it’s all women. I always think it’s kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.
3 December 2020 Anne Stevenson I’m not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word’s meaning, or multiple meanings.
3 December 2020 John Denham Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
3 December 2020 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Nothing truly convincing – which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill – has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.
3 December 2020 James Schuyler However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
3 December 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
3 December 2020 Jacques Derrida I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
3 December 2020 Norman MacCaig All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve enjoyed.
3 December 2020 Amy Winehouse I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.
3 December 2020 Patti Smith What I wanted to do in rock ‘n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
3 December 2020 John Andrew Holmes To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
3 December 2020 Gerard Manley Hopkins It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.
3 December 2020 Wallace Stevens Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
3 December 2020 J. G. Stedman Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
3 December 2020 Anne Stevenson I don’t like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
3 December 2020 Eugenio Montale This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
3 December 2020 Ian Hamilton Finlay For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don’t have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
3 December 2020 William Wordsworth Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
