3 December 2020 Mark Strand I certainly can’t speak for all cultures or all societies, but it’s clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It’s not part of the cultural mainstream.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski I don’t like political poetry, and I don’t write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
3 December 2020 June Jordan The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
3 December 2020 Octavio Paz To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.
3 December 2020 Tracy K. Smith So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.
3 December 2020 Abbas Kiarostami Poetry always runs away from you – it’s very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.
3 December 2020 Michael Tippett Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
3 December 2020 Marilyn Hacker Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
3 December 2020 Thomas Lynch But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
3 December 2020 Russell Baker I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
3 December 2020 Jeffery Deaver I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
3 December 2020 Robert Staughton Lynd Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
3 December 2020 Brian Harris To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.
3 December 2020 Martin Amis The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.
3 December 2020 James Broughton My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
3 December 2020 Roger McGough Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.
