Poet Quotes
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When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.
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Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.
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A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
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In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
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Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.
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What the poet is searching for is not the fundamental I but the deep you.
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“A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.”
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
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poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
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There are still many writers out in the Bay, extraordinary writers like Gina Valdez, a poet who I just saw in Portland. We have young people like Eduardo Corral, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award. José Antonio Rodriguez, published by Luis Rodriguez. But there are only a few of us who are paid attention to in New York. There are legions behind us who are not.
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When I have had enough of tears and love, I turn to some poet, and set out again for a new world.
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For a man to become a poet, he must be in love, or miserable.
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Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.
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They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.
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I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
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Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.
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For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.
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Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
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The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
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I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
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There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.
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Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
