Amy Gerstler Quotes

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

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