Ethan Canin Quotes

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

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

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

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

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

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

I'm a poet.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

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.

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

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I read mostly poetry.

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

It's not easy to define poetry.

I love playing with words and texture.