Best poet & people Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 3

“So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.”

People Thinking Knows Way Needs Writing Mean Able Process Poet Systematic Revision

Author:Edward Hirsch

“I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.”

People Thinking Writing Culture Sides Dark Poet Program Dark Side Writing Poetry

Author:Edward Hirsch

“I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.”

People Ifs Thinking Mean Has Beens Might Left Position Poet Offers Ancestor Left Out Aristocratic

Author:Edward Hirsch

“In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.”

“Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.”

People Want Firsts States Figures Students Poet Praise Shock Graduates Public Figures Graduate Students

Author:Erica Jong

“I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".”

People Knows Next Cry Poet Baby Beer Performing Dancer Feathers Festivals Lifting Cinco De Mayo

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.”

People Next Attention Poet Dancer Feathers Wise People

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“I was reading Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, but these weren't the poets that influenced me. I think Gwendolyn Brooks influenced me because she wrote about Chicago, and she wrote about poor people. And she influenced me in my life by giving me a blurb. I would see her in action, and she listened to every single person. She didn't say, "Oh, I'm tired. I gotta go." She was there, and present, with every single person. She's one of the great teachers.”

People Thinking Giving Persons Action Reading Poor Teacher Poet Tired Chicago Poor People Brooks I'm Tired Great Teacher Single Person Emily Arlington

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“I want people to see the beauty of that condition through the eyes of the characters. In doing that, they can allow people who have the condition to be more accepting of it, and to be open about it. That would be a contribution to the people who have it, and considering that 38% of the Pulitzer Prize winning poets are Bipolar, to think about how much these individuals have contributed to the human spirit.”

People Thinking Want Humans Character Would Be Eye Spirit Winning Individual Accepting Conditions Poet Contribution Prize Considering Human Spirit Bipolar Through The Eyes Prize Winning

Author:Paul Dalio

“People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.”

People Writing Song Born Poet Knack

Author:Petra Haden

“A poet or a comedian can say what's on the mind of people. They should be funny. They should make you laugh. It may be so truthful that it hurts, but it makes you laugh.”

People Should Mind May Hurt Laughing Poet Comedian Truthful It Hurts Make You Laugh

Author:Russell Simmons

“These days, most of my interactions with young people are centered on the poetry or theater classes I teach, so the students I know are reading contemporary poets (they love Willie Perdomo) and scripts (No Child, by Nilaja Sun and Twilight by Anna Deavere Smith). I don't know their reading habits outside of our class, but I believe that they enjoy stories that they can relate to, learn from, be challenged by - you know, the usual good writing that every reader craves.”

“When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.”

“There are still many writers out in the Bay, extraordinary writers like Gina Valdez, a poet who I just saw in Portland. We have young people like Eduardo Corral, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award. José Antonio Rodriguez, published by Luis Rodriguez. But there are only a few of us who are paid attention to in New York. There are legions behind us who are not.”

People Stills Young Behinds Attention Saws New York Poet Paid Extraordinary Awards Yale Legion Antonio Portland Gina

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great.”

People Children Made One Thing Poet Rounds

Author:Mary Ann Hoberman

“When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.”

People Writing Littles Ideas Different Soul Home Young Sound Struggle Generations Poet Music Is Jazz Meetings Drinking Notion Coffee Atmosphere Loud Cellphone Drinking Coffee Business Meeting

Author:Patti Smith

“I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.”

People Thinking Feels Reading Speak Roles Records Wonderful Groups Poet Development Return Excited Wonderful Things

Author:Sylvia Plath

“I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can't understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical.”

“In the interest of the ethical and moral health of the country, the writer, the poet, the artist, the thinker, must hold a mirror up his or her country and say, look, this is who we are, this is how we live, this is our past, we must own it, forgive ourselves, transcend our transgressions, and become better people. Turning the tide must be a continuous effort.”

People Country Past Artist Interest Effort Moral Poet Forgiving Ethical Thinker Our Past

Author:Clarence Major

“Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).”

People Giving Reading Energy Pleasure Audience Poet Absence Mystical Rapport

Author:Ron Padgett

“I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."”

People Thinking Art Artist Culture Poet Couple Critics Librarian

Author:Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I"m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.”

People Thinking Poet Duty Mythology Tigers Labyrinth

Author:Jorge Luis Borges

“What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.”

People Art Real Soul Artist Poet Moved Dreamer Elsewhere Fringe Nostalgic Squat Metropolis

Author:Jay McInerney

“And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.”

People Thinking Speak Language Views Poet Higher Ordinary Planes Daily Life Ordinary People

Author:Stephen King

“It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?”

People Poet Justify Vocation

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“I wanted to write not exclusively for (or against) poets or scholars, though many of them are people, too! But that was not my primary audience. It was that person you like who tells you they don't get poetry, and you think to yourself, aw man, what can I do for this good person?”

People Thinking Men Writing Audience Poet Scholar Good Person

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“I've noticed that there can be a visceral reaction to strong statements about poetry, as if anyone who has an opinion and expresses it is shutting people down. It's funny to see that expressed, and then to go back and read poetic statements by the great poets of the past: they are full of a passionate conviction! It is clearly possible to express strong feelings about poetry while also defending the absolute right of myriad approaches.”

People Feelings Past Strong Opinion Poet Passionate Conviction Poetic Great Poet Strong Feeling

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“I think, as poets, we are in the odd position of constantly defending our art form. Which is funny and also sort of invigorating, too. No one really says, "Oh you're a lawyer? I've never understood the law. In fact, I kind of hate it." Or, "Oh you wait tables? I didn't know that was something people did." I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily. We have to explain ourselves to people all the time. We have to say, "Yes, I am a unicorn, believe in me."”

People Thinking Believe Kind Art Hate Waiting Poet Lawyer Odd Believe In Me Unicorn

Author:Ada Limon

“I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.”

People Thinking World Poet Seven Recognition Neglect

Author:Stephen Dunn

“I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.”

People Thinking World Mean Different Desire Values Individual Sacrifice Security Poet Unique Commitment Philosopher Courageous

Author:Marc Maron

“People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.”

People Long Audience Poet Representation Personal Life Distasteful Personal Space

Author:Rae Armantrout

“I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.”

People World Writing Trying Important Poet Metaphor Tension Helpful

Author:David Biespiel

“Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.”

People Thinking Writing Political Values Identity Poet Myth Chosen Plenty Propaganda Good Times Idiom

Author:David Biespiel

“The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.”

People Men Choices Black Laughing Hell Poet Scare Freak Funk

Author:David Bowie

“Italian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.”

People Writing Trying Different Speak Fun Situation Break Poet Tradition Seven Radical Prose Poetic Italian

Author:Jonathan W. Galassi

“The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.”

People Writing Art Literature Poet Achievement Police Promotion Police State

Author:Elliott Colla

“I think the obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; it is not to be isolated but to be among people.”

People Thinking Poet Obligation

Author:Maria Teresa Horta

“If an artwork never gets any attention from anybody, then obviously it's got problems. If it gains attention from a very small elite, then it's presumably doing something. Finnegans Wake gets a lot of attention from certain people who become passionate about it, who are usually very good readers in general. Although - I often talk about costs and benefits - it seems to me the costs of reading Finnegans Wake are not worth the benefits, however many there may be. And it's the same with the more arcane among poets, Zukofsky and so on.”

People Problem Reading Attention Poet Very Good Passionate

Author:Brian Boyd

“My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

People Feels Trying Feelings Poetry Artist Leader Roles Society Poet Reflection Preacher Hippie

Book:John Lennon: drawings, performances, films

Source: John Lennon: drawings, performances, films

“There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.”

People Poetry Memories Poet Grew Grew Up Good Memories

Book:So ask: essays, conversations, and interviews

Source: So ask: essays, conversations, and interviews

“Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!”

People Trying Different Today Lord Poet Kicking Byron Romantic Poetry Heyday Kicking It

Author:Alan Moore

“I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.”

People Thinking Life Wisdom Remember Poet Experts Diligent Remember Me Workmen

Author:Laurence Olivier

“There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.”

People Writing Two Poet Type

Author:Daniel Radcliffe

“People will always blame the poets for society's ills. But these are the true artists.”

People Artist Poet Blame True Artists

Author:Russell Simmons

“Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.”

People Knows Want Firsts Persons Art Made Rocks Poet Who I Am

Author:Patti Smith

“If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.”

People Ifs Lying Social Race Progress Poet Realising Favourite Constructs

Author:Saul Williams

“I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.”

People Knows Want Mind Chance Poet

Author:Christina Aguilera

“The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.”

People Way Important Feelings Truth Jobs Beautiful Names Difficult Poet Telling The Truth

Author:Jane Kenyon

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”

People Men Heart May Soul Suffering Sound Cry Poet Lips Lovely Unhappy Your Soul Anguish Torment Sigh Flocks

Author:Soren Kierkegaard

Poet Quotes

Related topics

Poet Quotes