“Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.”
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“Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.”
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“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“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 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“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“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“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 learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.”
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“Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.”
Humor“Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.”
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“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 great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.”
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“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”
Poetry