'In a good poem as in a good marriage not everything is said.'
'The dog needs its fleas, the poet his miseries.'
'Prose adds. A poem multiplies.'
'Write drunk, but polish sober.'
— David Burnett, four aphorisms from Quoins for the Chase, New Century Press, 2003

'Gossip is part of ordinary life and therefore should find a place in poetry.'
— Craig Raine, Areté, Autumn 2003

'Because poetry depends on familiar life, it belongs in familiar life.'
— Andrew Motion, The Sunday Times, 30 November 2003

'I'm not sure I believe in something poetic "in itself". Hasn't most of modern poetry found the poetic in the everyday?'
— Kevin Young, Poetry, December 2003

'So many writers, it seems, are after the poetry of everyday life. Unfortunately, the average poet's daily thoughts are about as boring as a reality TV show, only more pretentious. (Bus stop epiphanies and walks in the park abound.)'
— Jane Yeh, Poetry Review, Autumn 2003

'On the whole the modern poet leads the same kind of quietly exasperated, uneventful life that is the lot of most contemporary citizens.'
— David Herd, The Guardian, 8 November 2003

'Many poets now write of domestic routines, which may take the adage Write what you know to the point of fallacy, or suicide. In the odd limbo of the suburbs... what's lacking is intensity...'
— William Logan, The New Criterion, December 2003

'In poetry, you work towards the intense instant. You certainly cannot subordinate poetry to a routine.'
— Harry Clifton, The Irish Times, 17 December 2003

'In order to write well, a poet needs to go to that place where energy and intensity concentrate, that place just beyond which chaos and randomness reign.'
— Gregory Orr, quoted in American Poetry Review, November /December 2003

'If you write about what you know, you will keep on writing the same thing, and you will never know any more than you do now.'
— George Bowering, quoted in The Iowa Review, Winter 2003/4

'My sense of poems, be they anti-war or pro-diversity, is that the poem's motive is not something I can often know in advance if it's going to be any good. The poem needs to find its own way, it needs to take me along toward where it wants to go.'
— Robert Wrigley, Sou'wester, Fall 2003

'We have made the writing of poetry an official subject on university campuses and have gone so far as to endow poets with legitimate careers at public expense, including salaries, health insurance, tenure, pensions, and faculty meetings. (That, dear friends, is a big change. Picture Keats or Rilke or Whitman at a faculty meeting.)'
— Peter Davison, Boston Globe, 9 November 2003

'American poetry (has) been subsumed by the creative writing corporation of America. It became a business in the sixties. Universities needed money, and creative writing programs were moneymakers.... It exists as this bizarre, quarter of a billion dollar pyramid scheme: Go out there and express yourself and you'll be confirmed in your self-esteem and you'll get your little prize and maybe even a publication.'
— August Kleinzahler, Poets & Writers On-Line, October 2003

'Poetry has fallen away from center stage in the past few decades... It survives, juddering a little now, in diffusion, in plurality, and in creative writing courses.'
— Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Harvard Review, Fall 2003

'You have to be a philanthropist to represent poets.'
— Jonathan Williams, The Times, 14 February 2004

'Why is the setting of poetry to music so dreary? Something there is in poetry that doesn't want to be lyrics.'
- J Bottum, The Weekly Standard, 24 November 2003

'The worlds of jazz music and poetry have this much in common: the acceptance-winning poet or jazz musician both have to be the best of their kind in an intensely competitive world, where nothing less than the highest order of technique and invention will do. The audience for this brilliance is small, fickle and intensely critical.'
— John Hartley Williams, Poetry Wales, October 2003

'Opera and poetry are elitist and obscure by nature, and ought to be sold on the joy of difficulty.'
— Lavinia Greenlaw, The Guardian, 20 December 2003

'I don't think poetry is a popular sport. Poetry requires a certain amount of solitude and silence and those are not the activities most people are interested in.'
— Richard Howard, quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 January 2004

'Poetry is the opposite of reality TV.'
— Niall MacMonagle, RTE Radio 1, February 2004

'At a time when energies are being marshaled in an effort to find a wider audience for poetry, perhaps it is a good thing to remember the almost impenetrably private nature of poetic composition.'
— Billy Collins, The Recorder, Fall 2003

'The first duty of the poem is to teach us how to read it.'
— Bin Ramke, The Writer's Chronicle, February 2004

'There is one important thing to say about poetry: you don't need to know a lot of it for it to have value and meaning in your life or the life of your society. Two or three poems, even two or three bits of poems, known by heart and genuinely cherished, can stand everybody in good stead.'
— Seamus Heaney, Friends of Classics, 13 January 2004

'One of the major reasons some poets write is because they just can't remember any poems by anybody else, so they write them themselves.'
— Thomas McCarthy, RTE Radio 1, February 2004

'Not all memorable poems are good, but all good poems are memorable.'
— Stephen Knight, Independent on Sunday, 14 December 2003

'Life is short and so, thank God, are most poems.'
— Christina Patterson, The Independent, 5 December 2003

'When a voice reads a poem it loves, something unique happens. The voice brings the heart and mind, indeed the very soul of the listener into the complete act and art of listening, and a certain illuminating intensity electrifies the words in such a way that the poem's rhythm and music, meaning and movement, come together in a passionate oneness that is truly mesmeric and memorable.'
— Brendan Kennelly, Voices and Poetry of Ireland, 2003

'Reading a poem on a page, in silence, with blank spaces around it, is one of the great experiences.'
— Ciaran Carson, Fortnight, December 2003

'The concept of song has gone out of contemporary poetry for the time being, and has been out of contemporary poetry for a long while. And all those attributes, like rhyme, complexity, or rigidity of meter, have gone. If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.'
— Derek Walcott, The New Yorker, 9 February 2004

'Formal poetry has returned to the fore. In fact, with stanza, metre and rhyme suddenly in saddle and war-whooping down on the empire, it may be time to declare the ruling aesthetic since the 1970S — the plain, the soft-spoken, the flatly prosy, the paraphrasingly simple, the emotionally "available" — officially dead.'
— Carmine Starnino, Globe and Mail, 22 November 2003

'The trouble with much so-called "experimental" poetry is that it looks exciting and "new" simply because of its arresting appearance on the page: read it out and it sounds quite flat.'
— N S Thompson, PN Review, November/December 2003

'The fact is that the British poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a conviction.'
— Gregory Woods, Magma, Autumn 2003

'A visiting Antipodean poet recently remarked, at the end of a reading by six young British poets, "How obedient they all are." He was referring to the ways in which their verse conformed, in its anecdotal structure, its oblique political manifests, poised ironies, the strict limitation of intent, to the lessons of workshops, the expectations of taste-makers, the requirements of the reading circuit.'
— Michael Schmidt, PN Review, January / February 2004

'Of the future's taste only one thing is certain: it will be ruthless. The few who happen upon periodicals like this one will look at all these poems into which we've poured the wounded truths of our hearts, all the fraught splendor and terror of these lives we suffered and sang — and they will giggle.'
— Christian Wiman, Poetry, November 2003

'Poets can love their early efforts — in not a few instances those pieces will be their best — but prose goes off quickly.'
— John Banville, The Irish Times, 21 February 2004

'Sometimes you read your old work and you find you really don't like the person that wrote it.'
— Don Paterson, Scotland on Sunday, 25 January 2004

'When I looked at [my old] poems, I realised that I just didn't like the person who wrote them.'
— A B Jackson, Poetry News, Winter 2003/4

'There are only so many ways of kicking a bad poem, and only so many ways of finding modest pleasure in the successful minor one. But the major poem is inexhaustible....'
— David Wheatley, The Irish Times, 7 February 2004

'We need critics, first of all, who can tell good verse from bad, and who then can act as collaborators with poets, guiding the reading public through the wilderness of various forms and pointing to the genuine triumphs of language that some poets have wrought. Until we get such critics, the audience of poets will remain almost entirely other poets.'
— Philip Marchand, Toronto Star, 13 December 2003

'Criticism, at least as we've come to understand it in Western culture, is by definition hierarchical: to criticize is to admit some system of relative value. Perhaps women are less inclined to make judgments in this way, or more inclined to make that system of value wholly individual.'
— Averill Curdy, Poetry, December 2003

'Burdensome artistically, exhausting over time, damaging to one's poetic reputation, and the source of rebuffs both private and professional... poetry reviewing is an enterprise only a few people ever do credibly or well, and then rarely for long periods.'
— Mary Kinzie, Poetry, January 2004

'I was going off to Death Valley some years ago and I bought a scorpion, a paperweight. I put this white piece at the bottom and anyone who gives me a bad review, I always put their name on it.'
— Roger McGough, The Independent, 28 November 2003

'The words of poetry should express what the eye sees, what the ear hears, and what the heart understands.'
- Lucille Clifton, quoted in Poets & Writers Online, 2004

'It is the job of women poets to describe men's bodies, every single bit of them.'
— Molly Peacock, quoted in PN Review, January 1 February 2004

'It's surprising how few references there are to striptease in modern poetry.'
— Grevel Lindop, PN Review, January 1 February 2004

'All good similes depend upon a certain essential heterogeneity between the elements being compared. The simile asserts a likeness between unlike things, but it also draws attention to their differences, thus affirming a state of division.'
— Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post, 9 November 2003

'Good poems come out of tensions; and by travelling you are deliberately putting yourself into a situation where there's a tension between the new and the old, where you are and where you've come from... In my own poetry, the poems which don't work are the ones I don't feel have enough conflict in them. It's out of the conflict that poetic power is generated.'
- Sinéad Morrissey, Magma, Summer 2003

'A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.'
— AB Jackson, Poetry News, Winter 2003/4

'Often a poet's strength seems to result from, or at any rate to accompany, the reconciliation of two opposing qualities...'
— Annie Finch, The Kenyon Review, Winter 2003

'The trouble with love poems is that the emotion reflects too much credit on the poet.'
— Anthony Cronin, The Sunday Independent, 22 February 2004

'People want something or think that you can be useful to them. If you're a poet, you're no good to anybody.'
— Roger McGough, The Independent, 28 November 2003

'When asked what I do, I try just to say I'm a writer, because telling people you're a poet compels them to go into nervous detail about why they neither read nor understand it.'
— Lavinia Greenlaw, The Guardian, 20 December 2003

'It's a life's work to write poetry. So, for anybody to say "Oh yes, I'm a poet" suggests you should be dead by now, you're finished!'
— John F Deane, RTE Radio I, January 2004

'I'm embarrassed to tell people, still, that I'm a poet... because I don't like poets. They're creeps. Some of my best friends are poets, but they're adult children, almost without exception. And the level of self-involvement is such that it's really a wonder, when they're stationary, the floorboards don't give way.'
— August Kleinzahler, Poets & Writers On-Line, October 2003

'I'm still embarrassed to say I'm a poet. I say I'm a writer and sometimes I say I work for the Inland Revenue, which kills the conversation. To say you're a poet is even worse.'
— Don Paterson, The Independent, 9 January 2004

'We do not, on the whole, want our poets to be cuddly and approachable. We don't want to think of them buying toilet rolls at Tesco or filling out their tax returns. We want our poets to be brooding, Byronic, beautiful and preferably dead.'
— Christina Patterson, The Independent, 6 February 2004

'I can pick a poet out a mile away: the greying hair, buttery complexion, rustic clothes, sheaf of papers and a book under one arm, the fag and doughnut in Bewleys for tea.'
— Brighid MacLaughlin, The Sunday Independent, 22 February 2004

'A lot of people have peculiar ideas about what a poet is. They imagine someone very emotional, perhaps sentimental, nostalgic — someone whose writing reflects their own personal experience, someone who is subject to bouts of melancholia.'
— Timothy Donnelly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 January 2004

'Unlike other work, being a poet is a culturally demeaned occupation. It's not the kind of thing I'd use as a pick-up line. Saying you're a famous poet is tantamount to saying you're a famous croquet player.'
— Christian Bök, Toronto Star, 3 January 2004

Poetry Ireland Review

Editor: Peter Sirr
Assistant Editors: Paul Lenehan, Dylan Brennan

Copyright © Poetry Ireland, Ltd. 2004
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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