The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with…

“Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Language, the poets' medium, should not be privileged over the protean materials of other artists,…

— Camile Pagli

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

— Charles Olson

I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know…

— Sam Hamill

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic,…

— Stephen Burt

Color is the language of the poets. It is astonishingly lovely. To speak it is a privilege.

— Keith Crown

“Poetry was a way to combat the staid and formulaic language of politicians that opposed the flexible and dynamic language of poets and writers.”

— Azar Nafisi

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas…

— Diane Wakoski

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind…

— Robert Morgan

Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors-often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to…

— Conrad Aiken

I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't…

— Christian Wiman

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current…

— Stephen Burt

If you look at the Directory of American Poets and Writers, you know there are hundreds of poets in New York City. So therefore,…

— Ted Kooser

“most of these American poets pushing and hustling their talents playing at greatness. poet (?): that word needs re- defining. when I hear that…

— Charles Bukowski

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living…

— Marilyn Hacker

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

— Diane Wakoski