“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry – which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”
— Michael Donaghy
“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves. We are not, for converse reasons, much interested, as a rule, in the slapdash maunderings of other people.”
— editorial in The Spectator
“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”
— Franz Wright
“There’s nothing like a punch in the mouth to remind you that that poem about your next-door neighbor was not as clever as you thought.”
— Simon Armitage
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"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."
— George Carlin
"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
— George Carlin
Warning:
Objects in the mirror of your perception appear larger than they are in real life.
- me (from The Book of Warnings)
"I think that all poetry is essentially optimistic, in that to write a poem is a "creative" act, therefore life affirming. A poem – a good poem – takes some of the chaos of life and orders it, contains it for a moment.
"The poem strikes a note or a chord – when it works – with which the reader vibrates sympathetically. It is a positive force.
"To write a poem requires a great deal of optimism: to believe that you have something to say and that someone, somewhere, wants to hear what you have to say, and to believe that somehow that will make some kind of unspecified difference."
– Louis Jenkins
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