Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
It’s been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they’ve got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.
Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of ‘Dead Poets Society,’ but actually no one really cared.
And some poets are far better read off the page because they’re very bad speakers. I’m thinking of one in particular whom I won’t name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.
My father would take me to auditions and put me in the room right in the corner because he was watching me; he couldn’t get a babysitter. He’d be at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the LES until four in the morning, trying to tell his story and using his craft, but because he had a kid that didn’t let him stop.
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.
Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it’s a writing style I guess I admire.
Poets are not meant to be in competition.
We think that there is this terrible idea that the kids are digital natives… and they know what they’re doing, but all the evidence says that they’re hanging around going, ‘Where are you, I’m here, can I post my picture?’ They’re not actually writing wikis; they’re not actually listening to great poets live.
Artists – musicians, painters, writers, poets – always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
Whether they are actual poets or their music exemplifies a poetic sensibility, generally speaking, the Americana artist shuns commercial compromise in favor of a singular vision. Which resonates with me.
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
If you want poets in space, you’ll have to wait.
Hip-hop is getting to the point now where they are going to start sounding like Al Jarreau or Bobby McFerrin or some of the other poets. Some of the better rappers can rap real fast without even melodies. It’ll get to that same point.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I’ll even quote. I don’t do tributes to cinema.
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
Poets are Damned… but See with the Eyes of Angels.
Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I’ve often found myself following in their footsteps – although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Poets wish to profit or to please.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he’s hardly ever mentioned.
When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.
Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that’s what hip-hop has always been about for me.
Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
I don’t see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough.
All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that’s why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.
Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan… In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.
I’m very proud of the fact that I’m one of Britain’s biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.
You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.
They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn’t matter; certainly, not to me.
There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.
Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different.
