Mark Takano Quotes

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

In seventh and eighth grade, grammar and vocabulary were not my favorite subjects.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

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

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

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

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

I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

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

I like poems that are little games.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

I excelled in English while I was at school.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

I was also in love with the English language.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

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.'

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?