Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

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

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

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

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.

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

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.

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.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

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

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.