“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“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good 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 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“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“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”
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“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 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“I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.”
Poetry“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”
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“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.”
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“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“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”
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“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“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“Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.”
Humor“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