Norman MacCaig Quotes

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.