“It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.” FactsLeftPoetSixTwentiesWorkersIronicDetroit Author:Philip Levine
“Many people I know - writers, poets - they have all been sentenced not once but sometimes three times after they come out. They serve five or six years, come out another time, and then nine years. Come out again, 12 years. Only because they have a different opinion. They are innocent people, they have beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.” PeopleKnowsYearsMindHeartDifferentSometimesBeautifulThreeOpinionFivePoetSixNineInnocentThree TimesNine YearsAnother TimeBeautiful HeartDifferent OpinionsBeautiful Mind Author:Ai Weiwei
“A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.” IfsSaidEnoughPoetLuckySixTrainStormImmortalLightningStanding Out Book:The voiced connections of James Dickey: interviews and conversations Source: The voiced connections of James Dickey: interviews and conversations
“The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice of those arts that isn't very pleasant. It used to be that a poet like Tennyson could keep his house and his coach-and-four and his staff of six servants on the income from poetry. That doesn't happen anymore.” MayArtHappensFormUsedDiesHousePracticeNovelFourPoetSixCoachesThings HappenIncomeUsed To BeServantPleasantStaffTennyson Author:William Monahan
“In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.” WayNeedsWritingBookTurnsPoetCallingSixModelsRecognitionGuidanceEpicUnderworldInfernoAeneas Author:Edward Hirsch
“John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.” WritingYearsMayLostPoetFameSixParadiseSpursMiltonRevising Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim