“I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesPlaySeemsPoetTwentiesVery GoodNineNovelistsNine Years Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.” PoetryPoetIdealsVery GoodDeliberate Author:Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.” IfsWorldWritingDifficultChancePoetIdealsVery GoodAssOur WorldLimbsChances AreBest Poet Author:Sam Hamill
“I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk.” ThinkingBookJobsYoungBitsTermRiskGroupsTeachingPoetReaderModelsProgramSeriesVery GoodPublish Author:Edward Hirsch
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“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.” PeopleProblemReadingAttentionPoetVery GoodPassionate Author:Brian Boyd