Quotes & Sayings About Contemporary Poetry

I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry. — Christian Wiman

At a normal high school, having class outside on a gorgeous May day is usually pretty awesome. It means sitting in the sunshine, maybe reading some poetry, letting the breeze blow through your hair ... At Hecate Hall, a.k.a. Juvie for Monsters, it meant I was getting thrown in the pond. — Rachel Hawkins

Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes. — Michael Cisco

The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other. — Brenda Hillman

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry. — Alice Fulton

Spilling a Secret

What its size,
will have varying
consequences. It's not
possible to predict
what will happen
if you
open the gunnysack,
let the cat escape.
A liberated feline
might purr on your lap,
or it might scratch
your eyes out. You can't
tell
until you loosen the knot.
Do you chance losing
a friendship, if that
friend's well-being
will
only be preserved
by betraying sworn-to
silence trust? Once
the seam is ripped, can
it be
mended again?
And if that proves
impossible, will you be
okay
when it all falls to pieces? — Ellen Hopkins

Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. — Nick Hornby

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible. — Cynthia Ozick

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. — W. H. Auden

A heartbeat without anything to support
A body that fears its own warmth
You who hates their own reflection
Are you unable to face forward anymore? — Tiffany Fulton

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds. — Sam Hamill

Painted desert, ocean of color
sun's worshiper, moon's lover
picture of a coyote's voice
sandbox of angels, another toy. — Trine Daely

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289) — Azar Nafisi

Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom. — Michele Brenton

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. — Chaim Potok

We have already shown by references to the contemporary drama that the plea of custom is not sufficient to explain Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, but if we widen our survey to the entire field of English letters in his day, we shall see that he was running counter to all the best traditions of our literature. From the time of Piers Plowman down, the peasant had stood high with the great writers of poetry and prose alike. Chaucer's famous circle of story-tellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark was eminently democratic. — William Shakespeare

If anxiety is the major force of our contemporary condition, a lot of poetry - including my own, mostly - sort of tries to escape that, fly off into magical thinking or bewilderment or whatever. — Mike Young

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. — Aberjhani

Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor, — Paul Ruffin

With one perfect kiss on one perfect English summer afternoon, we understand the meaning of all the colors of every rainbow, forevermore. — Hunter S. Jones

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side. — Frank O'Hara

All writers are manipulative liars.
Jack O. Savage, The Poet — Hunter S. Jones

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. — M. John Harrison

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are. — Billy Collins

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him. — Don DeLillo

I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music. — Oscar Hijuelos

I don't feel at home where I am,
or where I spend time; only where,
beyond counting, there's freedom and calm,
that is, waves, that is, space where, when there,
you consist of pure freedom, which, seen,
turns that Gorgon, the crowd, to stone,
to pebbles and sand . . . where life's mean-
ing lies buried, that never let one
come within cannon shot yet.
From cloud-covered wells untold
pour color and light, a fete
of cupids and Ledas in gold.
That is, silk and honey and sheen.
That is, boon and quiver and call.
That is, all that lives to be free,
needing no words at all. — Regina Derieva

The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years. — Edmund Gosse

The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect "Item poetry" in novels. — Himmilicious

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don't separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing? — Etel Adnan

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases
as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified. — Roland Barthes

Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung. — John Allison

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. — Niall Williams

I've changed, you've changed
We've become something more than what was hoped for or foreseen — Tiffany Fulton

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them. — W. H. Auden

Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots. — Sally Jo Martine

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. — Ben Lerner

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things. — Luis Gonzalez

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor. — Tony Hoagland

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W.S. Merwin

In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it. — Frederick Lenz

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. — Paul Auster

Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written. — Tessa Emily Hall

Like contemporary poetry , philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished. — Samuel R. Delany

I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry. — Chang-rae Lee

Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own. — Hunter S. Jones

If you read any poetry or stories coming out these days, you know what I mean when I say that you can smell the stench of liquor coming from the words they write. And underneath their sentences lies a pile of chicken and goat bones, and the skeletons of the innocent ones. If you poke the head of the broom into contemporary literature, you'll find a hollow wall stuffed full of money - impure, dirty money. — Uday Prakash

Hardy's astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy's impressions of life. — Geoffrey Harvey

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. — Dennis Gabor

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore. — Billy Collins

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store. — William H Gass

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events. — Diane Wakoski

a generation:
the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light — Gu Cheng

So I don't think I'll make Poet Laureate,
but I swear I'm not twisted and bitter,
If finely-wrought talents
don't weigh in the balance,
I can always write haiku on Twitter. — Rosy Cole