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"But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still."
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"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"
"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."
"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
Explore more quotes by Ian Hamilton Finlay
"What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever."
"I came to these mediums through having the garden, and of course, people who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration, and never made their own inscriptions."
"But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it."
"However, I don't feel the world is looking over my shoulder when I am working - I never think about this at all. What I think about is trying to make my work pure, and if it is pure then it can be accessible. It is quite straight forward really."
"The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture."
"I am always a beginner. I only try to include different parts of life; the pastoral, the tragic, et cetera."
"For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not."
"I have often said that just as the French revolution, for instance, understood itself through antiquity, I think our time can be understood through the French revolution. It is quite a natural process to use other times to understand your own time."
"Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different."
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