Dan Amboyer Quotes

I read mostly poetry.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

The cliche is dead poetry.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

The first time I read 'Leftovers,' I didn't get it at all.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

I'm really into poetry.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.