Poet Quotes - Page 38

• As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dogma, Young

  Source: criticalflame.org

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• Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

  Adrienne Rich

  Years, Imagination, Path

  Source: criticalflame.org

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• Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Appreciation, Grief, Mind

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2016). “Complete Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Delphi Classics)”, p.1032, Delphi Classics

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• I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

  Mike Patton

  People, Musical, Way

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. January 2013.

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• When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you're an adult and you're a poet, it's all about love and pain, but if you're a kid it's, "Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?"

  Mike Birbiglia

  Funny, Song, Pain

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• It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.

  Anne Waldman

  Egypt, Blue, Years

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

  John F. Kennedy

  People, Neutrality, Panic

  Speech, Tulsa, Okla., 16 Sept. 1959 (printed in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allan Nevins [1960]).

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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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• 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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• For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

  Philip Levine

  Sea, Ordinary, Oblivion

  Philip Levine (2002). “So ask: essays, conversations, and interviews”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

  Philip Levine

  Young, Written

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• Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

  Kathleen Norris

  Hard Work, Writing, Heart

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