John Burnside Quotes

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.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

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

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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

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

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

In its fifty-first year of publication, 'The Paris Review' continues to search for new ways to bring together writers and readers.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers. In fact, after graduate school, I lived in Japan, Ohio and New Orleans, and only upon leaving Pittsburgh did I see what a special community it was for poets, so I was eager to come back. It's a strong arts community across the board.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.