Poetic Experimentation Quotes

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.

[Kenneth Koch] taught us to be playful, to be very appreciative of other poets, to appreciate all forms of expression. He taught us to be experimental.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

We can understand poetry from a billion - in a billion styles, experiment, tradition, combination, spice, meter, image. It's all there for the poet and for the listener and for all of us.

I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.

The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.