Steve Martin Quotes

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

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.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

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

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

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 don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

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

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

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.

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.

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

Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.