Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We don't know our own story.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
There are either poems about sex/love or God.
The Earth forgives the previous year every year.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.
Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.
As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.
There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.
Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.
I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.
If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.
I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.
I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.
When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.
I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.