The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences – what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.
Kevin Smith is so great in ‘Kingdom Come,’ isn’t he? He’s kind of this very earthy poet. He just has this immediate gregariousness, like, you kind of just want to be his pal.
I’ve known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse – though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like – even as it’s been bestowed upon me – I must continue to live up to what it means… Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.’
I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
As a poet, I would always hear emcees come up to me and say, ‘Yo, you should rap,’ and I was like, ‘No.’ You know, the label was tough for me. I’m a poet. I was proud of that distinction between the two, not wanting to be the other.
A poet should always be ‘collaborating’ with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all – ergo, I’ve never met a nice poet.
I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn’t enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led.
If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.
My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places… I’ll leave what I mean by ‘places’ ambiguous.
A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
When my father got the letter from Satyajit Ray saying I could work with him, I had to give up ‘Saat Hindustani.’ So I left for Calcutta and Amitabh got the role of the poet that I was supposed to play.
I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he’s now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And ‘literary artist’ – poet and novelist – is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
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.
I feel that I’m a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it’s the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.
One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven’t read.
I don’t think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.
My dad’s a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player – he’s a bluegrass musician. It’s always been a part of the family.
Jose Marti, known as ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence,’ was an influential poet, journalist, and political theorist who became a symbol for the Cuban people’s bid for independence. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-determination feature prominently in his work.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others; it’s for others to use.
I don’t consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I’m a music producer, lyricist. I’m a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s future.
I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Poetry itself is music. I’m just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn’t quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that’s how I always try to start my thoughts.
My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school – he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
I see myself as a songwriter and a poet.
We met with the poet Frank O’Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn’t exist.
I am a poet, and I speak poetically.
I always turn to Frank O’Hara and David Berman’s ‘Actual Air,’ which came out in 1999. He’s a poet I haven’t tired of.
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
As his talent expands, some of his stories become pointed social commentary; some are surprisingly effective religious tracts, disguised as science fiction. Others still are nostalgic vignettes, but under it all is still Bradbury, the poet of 20th-century neurosis.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Dream study impacts culture. We are put in touch with the inner poet who dreams. We hear our inner, subjective response to the outer world. That helps spiritualize our lives.
Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
This is just rap. I’m not trying to make people think I’m some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.
