Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry,
edited by Dennis O'Driscoll
Note: What follows is the first section of the book; a list of all the section headings appears at the end of this piece.
What Is It Anyway?
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
CHARLES SIMIC, Dime-Store Alchemy, 1992
Poetry is a sofa full of blind singers who have put aside their canes... Poetry is the sound of summer in the rain and of people laughing behind closed shutters down a narrow street.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 January 2000
Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It's the tightest cage, and if you can get it to sing in that cage it's really really wonderful.
RITA DOVE, Poetry Flash, January 1993
Poetry is language at its most nourishing. It's the breast milk of language.
ROBERT CRAWFORD, The South Bank Show, October 1994
Poetry is like a substance, the words stick together as though they were magnetized to each other.
DAVID GASCOYNE, Stand, Spring 1992
Poetry is energy, it is an energy-storing and an energy-releasing device.
MIROSLAV HOLUB, Poetry Ireland Review, Autumn-Winter 1990
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
CZESLAW MILOSZ, Poets & Writers, November-December 1993
Poetry is a diagram of reality. A distillation of reality, that may make us free.
ALICIA OSTRIKER, The American Voice, no. 45, 1998
Poetry is language in orbit.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Sunday Independent, 25 September 1994
Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed.
YVES BONNEFOY, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005
Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.
MARK DOTY, The Cortland Review, October 2000
Poetry is words in space, representing words in time.
GLYN MAXWELL, Fulcrum, no. 4, 2005
Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.
DANA GIOIA, Can Poetry Matter?, 1992
Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority.
LEONARD COHEN, The Sunday Times
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
BILLY COLLINS, Portsmouth Herald, 23 January 2005
Poetry is a thief that comes in the middle of a new day, while the critics are still studying by night light.
JAMES LIDDY, Éire-Ireland, Spring 1991
Poetry expresses the newness of the day.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI, AGNI online, 2004
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language.
PETER PORTER, BBC Radio 3, May 1995
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
UMBERTO ECO, The Independent, 6 October 1995
Poetry is language wrought by feeling and imagination to such a pitch that it enacts and embodies the thing it says.
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, PN Review, March-April 1993
Poetry is a dialect of the language we speak, possessed of metaphorical density, coded with resonant meaning, engaging us with narrative's pleasures, enhancing and sustaining our pleasure with enlarged awareness.
DAVE SMITH, Local Assays, 1985
Poetry is a fire, well banked-down that it may warm survivors in the even-colder nights to come.
HUGH MAXTON, Dedalus Irish Poets, 1992
Poetry is deep gossip.
LIAM RECTOR, The American Poetry Review, September-October 2005
Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations.
JOSEPH BRODSKY, The New Yorker, 26 September 1994
Poetry is philosophy's sister, the one that wears makeup.
JENNIFER GROTZ, Here Comes Everybody blog, April 2005
Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.
R.S. THOMAS, Residues, 2002
Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality.
CAL BEDIENT, Denver Quarterly 39, no. 2, 2004
Poetry's a zoo in which you keep demons and angels.
LES MURRAY, The Australian, 10 May 1997
Poetry is... a kind of leaving of notes for another to find, and a willingness to have them fall into the wrong hands.
MATTHEW HOLLIS, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2004
Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.
CHARLES WRIGHT, Quarter Notes, 1995
Poetry is about the intensity at the centre of life, and about intricacy of expression. Without any appreciation of those, people are condemned to simplistic emotions and crude expressions.
ANNE ROUSE, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2001
Poetry is a way of communicating a vast array of thoughts and feelings by concentrating them into minimal, or even single, points which describe the whole.
FRIEDA HUGHES, The Guardian, 3 October 2001
Poetry is the meeting point of parallel lines—in infinity, but also in the here and now. It is where the patent and incontrovertible intersects with the ineffable and incommensurable.
JOHN SIMON, Dreamers of Dreams, 2001
Poetry is language pointing beyond its own capacities.
DON McKAY, The Toronto Star, 4 June 2007
Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.
HAROLD BLOOM, The Art of Reading Poetry, 2006
Poetry is like fingerprints / on a window, behind which a child who can't sleep / stands waiting for dawn.
HERMAN DE CONINCK, The Plural of Happiness, 2006
Poetry is the rapture of rhythmical language.
GREGORY ORR, The Washington Post, 16 May 2006
Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.
NATHALIE SARRAUTE, cited in Staying Alive, 2002
Poetry is a perpetual redefinition of beauty and truth in patterned language. An assault on yesterday's beauty which no longer shines. An assault on yesterday's truth which has become a lie.
ROSANNA WARREN, Fulcrum, no. 4, 2005
A poem is words at work, on us and for us.
PETER FALLON, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006
A poem is a machine for remembering itself.
DON PATERSON, Strong Words, 2000
A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
MARIANNE BORUCH, The American Poetry Review, September-October 2006
A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006
A poem is partly grace, partly discovery, and partly a struggle to squeeze out a little bit more, to conquer another foot of territory from the unconscious.
ÁGNES NEMES NAGY, A Hungarian Perspective, 1998
A poem is an attempt to find the music in the words describing an intuition.
P.J. KAVANAGH, BBC Radio 3, December 1990
A poem is a smuggling of something back from the otherworld, a prime bit of shoplifting where you get something out the door before the buzzer goes off.
NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, RTÉ I television, July 1995
A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle.
WILLIAM H. GASS, The Georgia Review, Spring 2004
A poem... is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire.
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Out of Fashion, 2004
Every poem is an answer to the question what poetry is for.
JAMIE McKENDRICK, The South Bank Show, October 1994
Section Headings from Quote Poet Unquote:
What Is It Anyway? |
Youth and Age Pushy Poets Getting into Difficulty What It All Means Poetry in Emotion Word Count Original Angles The Poetry Cure Poetry Politics Making Nothing Happen Making Something Happen Musical Arrangements U.S. Poetry British Poetry Irish Poetry Home and Abroad Prize Poetry In Critical Mood Lost in Translations Anthologies Poetry at War Celebration, Consolation, Lamentation Holy Writ Closed Shop Present, Past, and Future Alcohol and Pub Talk Physical Poetry Labels and Categories Moving On Beyond Words Post-Poetry Tristesse Death by Poetry |
About the Author
Dennis O'Driscoll was born in Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1954. His eight books of poetry include Weather Permitting (Anvil Press, U.K., 1999), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Prize; Exemplary Damages (Anvil, 2002); and New and Selected Poems (Anvil, 2004), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. His latest collection is Reality Check (Anvil, 2007; Copper Canyon Press, 2008). A selection of his essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (The Gallery Press, Ireland), was published in 2001. O'Driscoll received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005, and the O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies (St. Paul, Minnesota) in 2006.
Copper Canyon Press
Copyright © 2008 by Dennis O'Driscoll
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
