Quotes About Contemporary Poetry

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

Billy Collins

#5. 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

#6. I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.

Chang-rae Lee

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Trine Daely

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Himmilicious

#18. Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots.

Sally Jo Martine

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom.

Michele Brenton

#22. 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

#23. I've changed, you've changed
We've become something more than what was hoped for or foreseen

Tiffany Fulton

#24. a generation:
the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light

Gu Cheng

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

Alice Fulton

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Frederick Lenz

#31. All writers are manipulative liars.
Jack O. Savage, The Poet

Hunter S. Jones

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,

Paul Ruffin

#35. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

W.S. Merwin

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Diane Wakoski

#39. The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

Tony Hoagland

#40. 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