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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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"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."
"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."
"There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable."
"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them."
"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."
"The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both."
"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."
"Each day before the end of eveshe sought her lover, nor would him leave,until the stars were dimmed, and daycame glimmering eastward silver-grey.Then trembling-veiled she would appear,and dance before him, half in fear;there flitting just before his feetshe gently chid with laughter sweet:'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!For fain thy dancing I would see!"
Explore more quotes by James Laughlin
"I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world."
"Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of."
"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."
"I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention."
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