Ends Quote by Jan Clausen

... the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extrapoetic ends, constitutes misuse… it may be poetry's stubborn quality of rockbottom, intrinsic uselessness…

— Jan Clausen

Poetry can cause irreparable harm when misapplied

— Gail Carriger

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to…

— Louis Dudek

All poetry is misrepresentation.

— Jeremy Bentham

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

— Douglas Dunn

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

— Diane Wakoski

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find…

— Don Paterson

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

— Kenneth Koch

This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give…

— Don Paterson

...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...

— Billy Collins

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there…

— C.D. Wright