Poet Quotes
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Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
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If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
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The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.
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As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with me, poets more excellent lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors-of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here have a consciousness of superiority to many.
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At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful …
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I got a head full of headaches, a heart that's full of woes. I'm constantly singin' them down home blues, and not many people knows That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it... And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.
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But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?
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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
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The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.
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With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
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Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
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I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.
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Let all Black Poets die as trumpets, And be buried in the dust of marching feet.
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Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked. 'In the fortresses,' the swan replied. 'And the poets?' 'Lost in dreams of other worlds.' 'And the craftsmen?' 'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.' 'And the Wise, who made the world?' The swan lowered its black neck sadly. 'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.
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Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
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The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.
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Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned books, just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.
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Black Poets should live--not leap From steel bridges, like the white boys do.
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I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
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Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.
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Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers... This is not yet a scientific age.
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Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
