Autonomous Quote by Anne Waldman

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting.…

— Anne Waldman

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough…

— Allan Gurganus

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all.…

— Robert Hass

I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor,…

— Denise Duhamel

When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks…

— Jamila Woods

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

— Amiri Baraka

“In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and…

— Kevin Crossley-Holland

I studied art at Queens College, taking very few courses in literature. But I've always loved reading poetry and grew up enjoying the so-called…

— Douglas Florian

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

— Mary Gordon

“These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives.…

— Mary Oliver

Every poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community…

— Ted Kooser

“Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of…

— Zbigniew Herbert