David Antin Quotes

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

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

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.