Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

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.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

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

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

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

I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

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.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

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

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

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.