“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.”
Age“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“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.”
Age“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 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 learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.”
Poetry“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”
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“I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.”
Poetry“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“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“You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.”
Poetry“The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.”
Poetry“Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.”
Poetry“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“A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.”
Poetry“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“Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.”
Poetry“The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.”
Poetry“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”
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 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