Joshua Sasse Quotes

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

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.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

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 think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

More modern poetry is written than read.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.

I've always wanted to be a writer ever since I was in kindergarten, so that was ultimately what I wanted to do with my life.

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

Ideally, I'd love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as... dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.

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.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.

I love writing. I love to write, and I would eventually love to have some of my work produced.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.