Poetic Focus Quotes

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.