Poetic Discourse Quotes

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?