Attack Quote by Erica Jong

You don't have to be a poet, you don't have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact…

— Amanda Gorman

“And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell…

— Ben Lerner

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try…

— Robert W. Service

“When you write poetry honestly, and when you read it honestly, then you become an individual and build up a defense against becoming programmed.…

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do…

— Adrienne Rich

Part of what I try to do in schools is take poetry off of a pedestal and make it a little more accessible and…

— Sarah Kay

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality…

— Ben Lerner

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be…

— C.D. Wright

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I…

— Rita Dove

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are…

— Billy Collins

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.

— Leonard Cohen

I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem…

— Tony Harrison