[Some will have seen this before on previous poetryetcs but since
there's a call for poetics on poetryetc4 I'm sending it again.]
How and Why To Write Poetry: advice from those who know
1) Today dear friends I will sing beautifully and make you happy.
-- Sappho
2) The objects the imitator represents are actions.
-- Aristotle
3) A big book is a big bore.
-- Callimachus
4) Don't pay any attention to book prizes! Never. To none. Not
even the Nobel. They are a snare. -- Vincent Miller
5) Literature is language charged with meaning.
-- Ezra Pound
6) A man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and
examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among
a great many. -- Ezra Pound
7) Miles Davis (after a gig): Man, why do you play so long?
John Coltrane: I had to play that long, to get it all in.
8) True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.
-- Pope
9) Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
-- William Carlos Williams
10) Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to
keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays
into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to
act.
-- A. E. Housman
11) For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
-- T. S. Eliot
12) No data without experiment.
-- Sophocles, tr. Ezra Pound
13) Say what you will in two
Words and get through.
Long, frilly
Palaver is silly.
-- Marie-Francoise-Catherine de
Beauveau, tr. Ezra Pound
14) Interviewer: Doesn't it embarrass you to see Bobby trying to
learn how to play slide on stage? Jerry Garcia: Um, yeah.
But the point is, it doesn't embarrass him.
15) Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day ...
-- Allen Ginsberg
16) Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
-- Shelley
17) It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
-- William Carlos Williams
18) For years on years I have struggled with ink and hammer, O my
tortured heart, to make you an embroidery of fire and gold, an
orangetree hyacinth, a blossoming quince to console you ...
-- Nikos Gatsos
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