Poet Quotes - Page 12

• When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Creative, Taught

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Attention, Narrative

  Source: bigthink.com

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• That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Order, Narrative Structure

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• To be a poet you have to experiment.

  Matthea Harvey

  Experiments

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I'm no exception.

  Grace Cavalieri

  Children, Brain, Way

  "Four Energetic Women Behind America's Literary Arts". Interview with Daniela Gioseffi, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works.

  Grace Cavalieri

  Listening, Energy, Huge

  "Four Energetic Women Behind America's Literary Arts". Interview with Daniela Gioseffi, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• If anything, hearing another poet is a sacred experience I enter, but I can honestly say this does not influence my own work.

  Grace Cavalieri

  Doe, Sacred, Hearing

  "Women Behind America's Literary Arts". Interview with Daniela Gioseffi, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I've been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years - Persian poets and philosophers haven't said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Country, Buddhism, Years

  "They Should Be Grateful: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami". Interview with Zachary Wigon, filmmakermagazine.com. February 13, 2013.

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• Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Stammering

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Writing, Doe, Praxis

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• As poets, our lamentations are glorious, filled with the virtues angles would learn to envy.

  Masiela Lusha

  Envy, Virtue, Angle

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

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• I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.

  Dan Chiasson

  Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Dante Alighieri has the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. So it's talking about us, it's concerning us. Everything in it conveys sentiment, emotions. He is really the greatest poet ever. So I am really very proud to present the shining pearl of Italian culture around the world.

  Roberto Benigni

  Italian, Imagination, Shining

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Sound, Should, Particular

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.163, Ravenio Books

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• The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred.

  Lucian

  Country, Kings, Integrity

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• Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

  Billy Collins

  Country, Reading, Airplane

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Artist, Men

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”, p.24, New Directions Publishing

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• The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Sweet, Flower, Independent

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• Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.

  Andrew Hoberek

  Rap, Artist, Order

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• what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Taste, Inspired, Absurd

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (1993). “We: New Edition”, p.24, Penguin

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• For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

  Joy Williams

  Beautiful, Song, Eye

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.123, Rowman & Littlefield

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• If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

  Donald Hall

  Real, Wish, Want

  Donald Hall (1994). “Death to the death of poetry: essays, reviews, notes, interviews”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

  Chad Harbach

  Girl, School, Striving To Be The Best

  "Fielding Questions on The Art of Fielding". Interview with Joshua Lars Weill, www.gq.com. September 2, 2011.

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• .. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

  Sharon Olds

  Love Is, Community, Bird

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• I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.

  Alex Grey

  Art, Creativity, Thinking

  "LSD Helped Forge Alex Grey's Spiritual, Artistic and Love Lives". Interview with David Ian Miller, www.sfgate.com. March 24, 2008.

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