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"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
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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."
"Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig."
Explore more quotes by James Laughlin
"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian."
"I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it."
"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry."
"We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good."
"With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said."
"Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important."
"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
"I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago."
"It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends."
"I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets."
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