Poet Quotes - Page 37

• Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.

  Bei Dao

  Support, Different, Helping

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Practice, Attention, Want

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Voice, Should, Planets

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Thinking, People

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• The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Environmental, Stuff, Bleeding

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• My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

  David Starkey

  Thinking, Forgiving, Listening

  Source: andreaauten.wordpress.com

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• And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.

  Lee Gutkind

  Passion, Views, Two

  Source: speechwriting-ghostwriting.typepad.com

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• No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.

  Anne Waldman

  Writing, Mean, Vision

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.

  Michael Longley

  Country, Couple, America

  Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk

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• I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

  Michael Longley

  Treasure, Way, Kind

  Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk

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• Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

  Michael Longley

  Hot, Revision, Red

  Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk

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• I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Writing, Thinking, Long

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Meaningful, Reading, Writing

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

  James Arthur

  Art, Writing, Giving

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Ideas, Perfect

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

  James Arthur

  Fighting, Thinking, Stubborn

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Appreciate, Diversity

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.

  Cate Marvin

  Country, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

  Cate Marvin

  Believe, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• I believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it's not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling.

  Uwem Akpan

  Jesus, Powerful, Believe

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For me, the intent in a song is to sing it. I compose songs, meaning I'm writing words to be set to music; I'm intending it to not be recited. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I'm a poet, and there really isn't a contradiction, at least for me.

  Cornelius Eady

  Song, Writing, Singers

  "Breaking into Song: An Interview with Cornelius Eady". Interview with Alexis Orgera, www.anmly.org.

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• For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.

  Mike Leigh

  Mean, Artist, Journey

  "Big Think Interview With Mike Leigh". Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 7, 2010.

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• I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Prayer, Believe, Moving

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

  Thomas Moore

  Men, Sea, Forever

  Thomas Moore (1841). “Select Poetical Works”, p.55

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• Wine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life.

  Robert Mondavi

  Wine, Civilization, Culture

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