Amitava Kumar Quotes

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

I like poems that are little games.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

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

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.