To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
I’m not a journalist; I’m a poet.
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.
The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?
There was no real poet in the band, but we tried.
Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.
Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn’t exist or inhere in poems alone.
We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them.
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.
I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He’s had many lives. My dad’s a capitalist to his bone, but he’s also a human to his bone.
In African-American culture, there’s often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.
I’ve always been a poet. My dad went to Lincoln University with Gil-Scott Heron, so I came out of the womb listening to Gil-Scott Heron.
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for – and it must be said again – the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
I saw an amazing film when I was 16 called ‘Slam’. It’s about a spoken-word poet. Saul Williams is in it.
So, I’ve never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don’t want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
I’ve always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don’t think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
I don’t think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional… I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.
What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.
Edgar Allan Poe, I think he’s a brilliant poet. I was actually given a copy of his work when I was, like, 8 years old that was my grandfather’s, and I still carry it around with me.
‘A Death in the Gunj’ is set in 1979 and we had to mute a joke that referred to Indira Gandhi. The censors also wouldn’t allow the tortoise that some of the characters talk about to be called Kalidas because it’s the name of a respected poet.
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
The poet’s spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren’t so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he’s a poet in black and white.
Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
I remember, in fifth grade, doing a report on the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin as a rap. It was just an easy way to get an A back then because everyone was turning in boring stuff.
I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
‘Rather You Than Me’ just speaks for my natural instinct to survive, but it’s also me being a writer, me being a poet – there’s also a beautiful side to ‘Rather You Than Me.’
I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
No bad man can be a good poet.
My focus is on the reader and that the poet’s job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet’s job is to inspire some future reader.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children’s author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
When I talk of hearing a poet’s voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
I didn’t have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.
