DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.
The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.
I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.
And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films.
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.
[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.
I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.
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.
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
