James Laughlin Quotes

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

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.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.