Amitava Kumar Quotes

Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don't see it like that.

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

Every time I sit in the audience and watch a show that I have been involved with, it is such an amazing feeling to see all those people around me, knowing they are actually watching and enjoying something I have written.

I saw an amazing film when I was 16 called 'Slam'. It's about a spoken-word poet. Saul Williams is in it.

I was an English major in college, so I really liked spoken word and poetry; it was what I did before I wrote music.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

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

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.