Poetry Education Quotes

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.

Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.