Quotes

Good Advice from Some Mentors

There is an element of danger in all new utterance. We prick our ears like an animal in a wood at a strange sound.

D.H. Lawrence

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

Gary Snyder

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Robert Frost

I like light rhymes, inconspicuous rhymes and un-pompous conspicuous rhymes.

Marianne Moore

Dichten = condensare.

Ezra Pound

Poetry should not require academic translators to mediate between the poet and his or her audience. Poetry is a sensory mode where ideas are or should be fully embodied in emotion or in imagery grounded in the material world.

Camille Paglia

Let us add to this the most important phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry: they took for granted the union, indeed the identity, of the lyrist with the musician. Compared with this, our modern lyric poetry seems like the statue of a god without a head. . .  Melody generates the poem out of itself . . . The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness in the music that compelled him to figurative speech.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for the inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race! Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy'd or Flourish! The Primeval State of Man, was Wisdom, Art, and Science.

William Blake

True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously atuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity—a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author's death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic . . . Indian mystics hold that to think with perfect clarity in a religious sense one must first eliminate all physical desire . . . but this is not at all the case with poetic thinking, since poetry is rooted in love, and love in desire . . . . However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal presuppositions . . . [One] must achieve social and spiritual independence at whatever cost, learn to think mythically as well as rationally, and never be surprised at the weirdly azoölogical beasts which walk into the circle; they come to be questioned, not to alarm.

Robert Graves

Photo: Laura Barrett