Tracy K. Smith Quotes

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

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

I've always thought my poems told stories.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.