Anna Quindlen Quotes

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

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.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

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.

For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it. ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

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

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.