Caroline Kennedy Quotes

I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.

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.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.