Poetic Perspective Quotes

I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn't see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.

The world isn't logical, it's a song.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

To a poet nothing can be useless.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.