Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

When something works on a huge level, everybody does it.

My first publication was a haiku in a children's magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.

If it's accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it's as mainstream as it gets.

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

I think DVD has been a real gold mine for a lot of reasons. You were selling a packaged good in a big mass market, so you could make it huge. You were selling or renting a thing that people didn't consume. You go to Blockbuster, rent five movies, and only watch two. That's a good business to be in.

When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

I was just lucky I lived in this time of mass-market paperbacks.

The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.

I deal in volume. To sell volume, it must be affordable. So that's my whole life, is to make it affordable.