I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
No opposing quotes found.