James Laughlin Quotes

• Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

  James Laughlin

  Reading, Thinking, Two

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• [Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

  James Laughlin

  Gertrude, Plot, Needed Someone

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• It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, Groups, Responsible

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• I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, Interesting, Attention

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• I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

  James Laughlin

  Country, Sound, Vacuums

  "The Way it Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin".

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• I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, Age, Poet

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• I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

  James Laughlin

  Break Up, Block, Writing

  26 Copy quote

• I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

  James Laughlin

  Reading, Mean, Thinking

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• With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

  James Laughlin

  Ideas, Long, Needs

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• Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

  James Laughlin

  Beautiful, Wall, Book

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• I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

  James Laughlin

  Reading, Thinking, Differences

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• I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, Years, Six

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• Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

  James Laughlin

  Gertrude, Bells, Now And Then

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• I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, Knowing, World

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• I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

  James Laughlin

  Book, Two, Three

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• We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

  James Laughlin

  Writing, People, Office

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• I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

  James Laughlin

  Thinking, People, Might

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