quotes from classic

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

more quotes from Diane Wakoski

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

more quotes from Diane Wakoski

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

more quotes from Diane Wakoski

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

more quotes from Diane Wakoski

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

more quotes from Diane Wakoski

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

more quotes from Derek Walcott

The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

more quotes from Margaret Walker

Could we forbear dispute, and practise love, We should agree as angels do above.

more quotes from Edmund Waller

So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.

more quotes from Edmund Waller