Tom Paulin Quotes

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

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 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.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.