Poetic Quotes - Page 9

• One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

  Paul Muldoon

  Poetry, Tree, Way

  Interview with John Redmond, www.poetrymagazines.org.uk. November 2, 1995.

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• I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

  Jerome Rothenberg

  Speech, Dimensions, Deny

  Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg (2016). “Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics”, p.484, Univ of California Press

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• The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

  June Jordan

  Writing, Important, Language

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• O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood; Land of the mountain and the flood!

  Walter Scott

  Children, Land, Nurse

  'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' (1805) canto 6, st. 1

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• In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

  Roman Jakobson

  Symbolism, Sound, Language

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• At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

  James Fenton

  Hymns, Practice, Four

  "Changing rooms" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. September 6, 2002.

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• So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

  Tony Hoagland

  Beautiful, Running, Hurt

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• All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.

  Oskar Kokoschka

  Expression, Fundamentals, Dimensions

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• On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Morning, Expectations

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• Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting

  Edouard Vuillard

  Art, Light, Color

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• I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

  Jean Toomer

  Might, Poet, Conscious

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• Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind

  Max Eastman

  Choices, Mind, Unions

  Max Eastman (1951). “Enjoyment of Poetry with Anthology”

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• However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

  James Schuyler

  Poetry, Prose, Sentences

  James Schuyler (2004). “Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991”

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• Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

  Mark Strand

  Poetry

  "In The Presence Of America: A Conversation With Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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• How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Poetry, Grows

  1985 In the New York Times, 12 May.

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• No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.

  Randolph Bourne

  Mistake, Heart, Reflection

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• I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

  Story Musgrave

  Space, Technique, Looks

  "NASA Distinguished Service Medal". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. May 22, 1997.

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• The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche

  Gaston Bachelard

  Surface

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• The poetic image exists apart from causality.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Causality

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• New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is.

  Theo James

  New York, Real, Poetic License

  "From Turkish Corpse to New York Cop" by Jeremy Egner, www.nytimes.com. February 15, 2013.

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• I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

  Rachel Kushner

  Book, Character, Ideas

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• The pilgrim is a poetic traveler, one who believes that there is poetry on the road, at the heart of everything.

  Phil Cousineau

  Believe, Heart, Traveler

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• And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

  Frank O'Hara

  Worry, Lineage, Natural

  Frank O'Hara (1995). “The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara”, p.307, Univ of California Press

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• No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

  Robert Graves

  Dream, Facts, Trance

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.105, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• With this blistering salvo of poetic gutshots Lawson has proven himself Bizarro’s true bard, its mad laureate. Switching from dark whimsy to retina-blast shock to political outrage without missing a beat, The Troublesome Amputee is a powerful collection of pitch-black verse.

  Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Powerful, Dark, Mad

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