John Drinkwater Quotes

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

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

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

No bad man can be a good poet.

I'd kill to be a poet.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

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

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

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.

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.

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.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

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