Poetry Reading Quotes

It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, you're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something. And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.

I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere / and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome’/ because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay but not Black / Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual / or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me / The day all the different parts of me can come along / we would have what I would call / a revolution

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.