Selected Quotations
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ON READING POETRY
"What I’m speaking of, I guess, is the sensation of discovery. When you find someone new or someone you’ve never read or read closely before, your entire perception of what poetry can do—even, what you never dreamed it could do—gets expanded. A fresh clarity enters your consciousness. Most wonderful of all, your faith in poetic invocation is renewed, restored, and brought home—even if the most critically refined thing you can say is “wow” or (should you feel particularly urbane) “whoa,” or you’re left entirely speechless, just blowing a long high whistle of admiration. Naturally I can have extended periods when the thrill of discovery is remote. At times, it feels unattainable. But then something comes along that washes out the dullness."
from "Renewed, Restored, and Brought Home"
"The intergenerational conversation among poets teeter-totters across centuries between, on the one hand, a poet’s interest in the linguistic medium of the art and, on the other hand, the poet’s interest in the experiences of a lived life."
from "The Armory Show"
"It happens more often than I care to admit. Some smarty says in the course of a conversation that he can’t stand poems that rhyme, and when he happens onto a poem that rhymes—as if he just trips over them everywhere he goes—he says he’s easily bored and can’t read on. Or not bored, but as a matter of principle won’t read it. I’m not making this up. People have said this to me. The worst offenders are aspiring poets."
from "Continuous Music"
"As a sequence of lines, a poem stretches both over the latitudes of a page with horizontal intensity and cruises down the page with vertical drive. I’ve come to imagine this shape—across and down, repeatedly—to be like a spiral of the imagination. Then, imposed on this spiral are a poem’s sentences. You could call the interplay between lines and syntax the lyric grammar of a poem for the way it frames a poem’s moments of experience and formulates its emotional rhythm. Yielding and cohering, this grammar discloses what is isolated, subordinated, and coordinated among the images, tones, voice, melodies, and narratives of a poem."
from "Spiral of the Imagination"
"What you see everywhere these days in our little magazines and online quarterlies in early twenty-first century America is poetry of the addled and the disheveled. Everywhere you look, cosmetic indifference, fleetingness, manufactured distress, automated irony, and rank certainty substitute for emotion, insight, and thought. American poetry has become overexcited, hesitant, misgiven, and uncertain. It’s freaked-out, neurotic, and uptight. It’s full of distrust."
from "Poise"
ON WRITING POETRY
"The act of writing poems contains an interesting paradox. The poet is just as often “lost to words,” to quote a phrase from Montale, as he or she is at a loss for words."
from "Lost to Words"
"Wallace Stevens once said that a poet is a “priest of the invisible,” meaning, I suppose, that a poet—who is not a priest obviously but more like a conjurer—is astonished by all things, including by what is barely known or fleetingly known, by what is all but imperceptible or what is suddenly realized, and even by what is absent entirely."
from "To See the Invisible"
"Poetry, like any art, is high-risk. Failure is imminent. To write poems in a single form repeatedly is to risk artistic failure repeatedly. Because, strangely, after the ninth or tenth one you’ve completed, the form begins to push back against your efforts. And push back harder after the twentieth, the fiftieth, the hundredth time. It’s as if the form develops its own laws and won’t let you break them without exacting punishment. And the mandatory sentence is a failed poem."
from "Struggle to the Finish"
"Surrealism offers liberation from received literary habits and conventions. Images are all-important and often placed in extreme juxtapositions. Language is fashioned to be elevated and absurd. Meaning is conveyed as ambiguous, ironic, mysterious, and psychological. With its associative, convulsive, swirling explorations of dreams, hallucinations, and the subconscious, the surrealist poem revolts against the limitations of logic and parades against reason."
from "Revolt Against Logic"
"Make it new? Yes. But the new is insufficient without virtuosity wrested from the past."
from "Not To Murder the Old"
ON POLITICAL POETRY
"I’ve always been leery of overt political poetry. It’s often bad poetry, badly written, and not effective as politics either."
from "To Witness and To Sing"
"Of the two kinds of political poetry, the first has never interested me. That’s the poem written to persuade, convince, induce, or sway you to its political position, the kinds of poems designed to forward a partisan agenda. If, for instance, we already agree with the agenda (ethnic cleansing is bad, say), then we’re just one of the choir being preached to. We might even say the poem is good, great, or terrific, but only because the poem proves we’ve been right all along. If we disagree with the agenda—Rudyard Kipling, for instance, wrote poems in praise of colonialism—then aren’t we right to call the poem simply propaganda."
from "To Witness and To Sing"
"For a poet, getting it right about war—inside the workings of a single poem, I mean—means finding a form and music that are necessary and insistent to the cause. It means facing war’s dark ambiguities: that war is humanity’s greatest crime (what Homer calls the “butchery of men”), that the soldier’s honorable wish is to be honorable, and that a country may be conquering and wrong at the same time."
from "Revere and Condemn"
ON AUDIENCE
"As much as our relationship to reading a poem is intellectual, imaginative, and emotional, it’s also intimately physical. A poet reaches his or her audience one reader at a time, one poem at a time, one voice at a time."
from "One Kind of Knowledge"
ON TRANSLATION
"The translation from one language to another—from Portuguese to English, say—is never an exact replica. It is, instead, a rendition, a cultural re-embodiment. The translator rides the edge between humility and risk, submitting to the original even while working to change it.
"Sometimes the risk can be fatal: the novelist Salman Rushdie’s Italian translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed, and his Japanese translator was stabbed to death.
"Once the frontiers are crossed, the boundaries of the new language can even be extended. Rendered from Latin translations of Greek translations of the Hebrew original, the King James Bible, for instance, became a seedbed for the rhythms and cadences of our English poetic tradition. William Shakespeare’s debt to translations of Italian narratives is enormous—and his enrichment is ours. Try to imagine a world of poetry in English without Dante, Baudelaire, Basho, Rilke, Akhmatova, Neruda, Milosz—and the list could go on—had these poets not been translated."
from "The Frontiers of Language"
ON LANGUAGE
"Poets delight in playing host to these lexical and fossilized metamorphoses because, in the end, all that a poet has to work with are the words on the page. How a poet intimately fashions his or her language...defines one’s poetics and style. To write poetry in American English is to negotiate a hodgepodge of diction—rural and urban, commercial and political, technological, regional, statistical, psychological, ethnic, slang, and Strunk and White."
from "Mishmash of High and Low"
"The aim of censorship is to force writers and poets—and citizens generally—to conform their opinions, beliefs, and values to some official ideology. Or, at least to be cowered enough to stay quiet about it. What censors always claim they do is enforce virtue. But it’s a bogus and faulty virtue. Censorship prohibits independent thought and imaginative inventiveness. When officials believe that the political, social, or moral order is threatened, they act to restrict free expression."
from "The Crime of Writing a Poem"
ON POETS
"If there were a Top of the Pops for poetry, Robert Hayden’s 'Those Winter Sundays' would be on it."
from "Discovery and Definition"
"If only one poet can truly be called the most American of American poets, there’s a good case to be made that it should be Walt Whitman."
from "Individuality and Equality"
"One poet who has a rich understanding of the relationship between private experience and public revelation is the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski whose poems have been appearing in English translation since the 1980s."
from "The Gamble"
"With a command so electrifying he influenced several generations of American poets...Robert Lowell’s unparalleled achievement was wrought at great personal cost, exacerbated by a famous pedigree, annual hiatuses in mental hospitals, and a serial rebelliousness."
from "Neither Marginalized Nor Banished"
"Much has been written about the eighth century Chinese poet Li Bai’s weakness for the bottle and about the legend of his death which was strange and exquisite."
from "Knock Back Experience"
"Richard Wilbur can bring more psychic weight to a few syllables than some poets bring to their entire oeuvre. I bring this up, but I’m guessing, too, that Wilbur must be sick to death of hearing about it."
from "A Mumble to Invent"
"Here’s something I never thought I’d write. Once I gave a lecture about Allen Ginsburg’s iconic poem, “Howl,” to 70 undergraduates when a handful of them up and walked out on me. I was later told they objected to the poem’s foul language and mentions of sex. Foul language and mentions of sex offending college students!"
from "Walking Out on the Walkout"