“The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.”
Poetry“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.”
Poetry“The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.”
Poetry“Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.”
Poetry“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”
Poetry“What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.”
Poetry“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”
Poetry“Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.”
Poetry“I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.”
Poetry“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”
Poetry“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.”
Poetry“Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.”
Poetry“A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.”
Poetry“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”
Poetry“In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.”
Home“Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.”
Famous“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.”
Art“I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.”
Poetry“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.”
Poetry“I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.”
Poetry“Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.”
Art“If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.”
Poetry