WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES

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1 "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" Emily Dickinson "There are all kinds of song. The genres are 'work-song, a personal power-vision song, war song, death song, courting song, hunting song'--all of these are used by people for their own needs and uses. But the special genre is healing song. The Shaman was the specialist in that. He returned to his power-vision song experience many times and deepened it over and over again, whereas other people had one power-vision song and that was enough. The power of this type of song--the power that the Shaman connects with--enables him to hear and to see a certain classic song which has the capacity to heal. And I think that we could say that self-conscious, quote, 'literary' poetry of the sort that has been transmitted for the last two millenniums in the West--the best of it belongs to that genre: healing song' Gary Snyder "The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person." Czeslaw Milosz "Poetry is essentially the soul's search for its release in language." Joseph Brodsky Where there is amenability to paraphrase, where the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night. Osip Mandelstam Poets think they're pitchers when they're really catchers. Jack Spicer 1

2 Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. Octavio Paz In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing brought forth which we didn't know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing its tail." Czeslaw Milosz All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination and the image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths. Eavan Boland If you only knew from what rubbish Poetry grows, knowing no shame, Like a yellow dandelion by the fence, Like burdock and goosefoot. Anna Akhmatova Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn't work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written. Charles Simic Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. John Ashbery Poetry is what is what Milton saw when he went blind. Don Marquis Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." Don Marquis 2

3 If there is no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money. Robert Graves "The rhythmic creation of beauty in words." William Packard "I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment." William Wordsworth "The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound that he will never get over it." Poetry is the way words "come together into some kind of magical conjunction that will make the reader enter into a real experience of his own--not the poet's. I don't really believe what literary critics have believed from the beginning of time: that poetry is an attempt of the poet to create or recreate his own experience and to pass it on. I don't believe in that. I believe it's an awakening of the sensibilities of someone else, the stranger." James Dickey Poetry is "voice music. Ancient poetry was all produced for that purpose. And that's still a very strong tradition....when I write, I always hear the voice in my head. I'm baffled that there is even a question about it." Erica Jong 3

4 Poetry is "that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species...it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." Samuel Taylor Coleridge Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting. "One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness--to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing." Wendell Berry "It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifyer without poetry." Philip Sidney "What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is." Samuel Johnson Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. Denis Diderot No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall behind the poems, planks of books, photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language. Adrienne Rich 4

5 "When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." John F. Kennedy 5