Poets From The United States

"I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head."

"Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you."

"The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud."

"Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow."

"I find free verse very, very difficult to write."

"Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind."

"Great poems are all fables about life."

"A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively."

"Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive."

"Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems."

"I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud."

"Not every poet is a great reader of his own work."

"Hollander's poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind."

"Language has an incantory power. The source qualities of language go to the very roots of our experience of poetry."

"Since he (Hollander) is a poet himself..he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration."

"We and the trees and the way Back from the fields of play Lasted as long as we could No more walks in the wood"

"Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes Hot, black clubs, Spring shower hearts about and Autumn shows A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes"

"The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else."

"The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral."

"The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design."

"The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry."

"Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful , delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry."

"Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem."

"For the poet, the biblical sense of 'know' is as much part of nature as the heat of fire, and in the cognative sense as much a given phenomonen as the brightness itself."

"The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms."

"One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it."

"'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern."

"Poetic form, as we know it, is an abstraction from, or residue of musical form.... The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes...all poetry was originally oral."

"Full interview with Wallace Shawn"

"I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times."

"I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality."

"The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive."

"I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript."

"In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."

"A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence."

"The poet faces his heart, his soul and his mood."

"I believe the art of the future including poetry will be simple, fresh and strongly coloured and will be understood and loved by the ignorant as well as the most cultivated. A popular art in the finest sense of the word."

"Even After All this time The Sun never says to the Earth,"You owe me."Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the whole sky."

"As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Ralph Chaplin did his part to make the organization a success. He wrote songs and poems; he made speeches; he edited the official paper, “Solidarity”. He looked about him; saw poverty, wretchedness and suffering among the workers; contrasted it with the luxury of those who owned the land and the machinery of production; studied the problem of distribution; and decided that it was possible, through the organization of the producers, to establish a more scientific, juster, more humane system of society. All this he felt, intensely. With him and his fellow-workers the task of freeing humanity from economic bondage took on the aspect of a faith, a religion. They held their meetings; wrote their literature; made their speeches and sang their song with zealous devotion. They had seen a vision; they had heard a call to duty; they were giving their lives to a cause—the emancipation of the human race."

"When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,"

"The Wobbly poet and newspaperman Ralph Chaplin (author of “Solidarity Forever”) recalled being introduced to Anarchist ideas — Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Most, etc — by an “FAS correspondent” on his way to Detroit via the box car."

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth"

"Barry was one of the first to see that mass and volume in sculpture were not dependent upon visibility... But also, and perhaps more importantly, that language was a necessary component to communicate the idea in conceptual art."

"But this logic has also worked to exclude the decorative — the decorative insofar as it functions solely as decoration. It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on "absolute" or "autonomous" art: thus on visual art — including even architecture — that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. Decoration is asked to be "merely" pleasing, "merely" embellishing, and the "functional" logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such "mereness." This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins..."

"Lorin Morgan Richards charts the paths of weird clouds that pass far overhead and then maps the changes that their rain makes on the lives of people living below."

"Lorin Morgan-Richards art reminds me of a modern day Charles Addams or Edward Gorey. He dabbles in the unusual and strange, yet there's just enough of the familiar in his artwork to keep it grounded."

"The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow."

"Lorin Morgan-Richards has woven the most whimsically woeful stories this side of Edward Gorey!"

"Morgan-Richards knows the best fantasy fiction isn't safe. His story tackles mature themes in a way that's accessible to youngsters, but doesn't candy-coat the topic. The author presents his themes¾colonialism, exploitation, and environmentalism¾in a graspable manner using fantastical characters and creatures. His world is one in which noble animals speak, and humans are often monstrous beasts. While sophisticated youngsters can easily digest the adventure story, it also gives them much to think about in terms of responsible stewardship of the Earth and its inhabitants. To say that the author’s ultimate goal is to instill empathy would not be far-fetched."

"I believe dreams connect us to our ancestors and it is through creativity that we can tap into this in the conscious state. Creativity is a sort of trance that we have as artists that erases time and space."