American Quote by John Burnside

“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