#poe

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer. ↗

— Rita Dove

#drafts #go #guilt #high #i

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about! ↗

— Rita Dove

#appointed #because #been #begun #blue

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate. ↗

— Rita Dove

#being #combination #exciting #find #i

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#all things #arrived #became #columbia #french

I drift like a cloud, Across these venerable eastern lands, A journey of unfathomable distances, An endless scroll of experiences... Lady Zhejiang here we must part, For the next province awaits my embrace. Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East, Where do you go? ↗

— Tom Carter

#china #chinese #collecting-poetic-lines #hangzhou #ji-ju

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention. ↗

— Michael Graves

#did #i #i see #invention #moral

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. ↗

— Robert Hass

#poetry #writers-on-writing #experience

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. ↗

— Carol Ann Duffy

#doing #english #experience #experienced #found

Poetry and prayer are very similar. ↗

— Carol Ann Duffy

#prayer #similar #very

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change! ↗

— Thom Gunn

#by the time #certain #change #closet #department