James Laughlin Quotes

22 quotes in 462 categories

• Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind…
• I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle…
• I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds.
• I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
• We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody…
• I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So…
• I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the…
• Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the…
• I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal,…
• I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem…
• 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…
• I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's…
• I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It…
• Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather…
• It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that…
• With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is…
• The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how…
• Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the…
• Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because…
• There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So…

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