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"I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself."
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"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
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"I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry."
Poetry
"I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets."
Poetry
"High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this."
Poetry
"So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet."
War
"Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins."
Poetry
"Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do."
Poetry
"I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior."
Poetry
"But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way."
Poetry
"I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry."
Poetry
"From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not."
Reading
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