#poe

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#come #composing #formula #i #myself

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#bishop #elizabeth #francisco #i #imprisoned

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#definition #old #poetry #teacher #understand

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#into #our #poems #put #reading

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#accepted #aware #been #being #editors

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#american #consider #creative #creative writing #culture

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#been #chair #discoveries #easy #farther

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#descriptive #each #fixed #individual #lyric

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#english #find #first #foremost #i

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#anybody #been #eliminated #exercise #genre