Poetry Quote by Lorine Niedecker

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

— Lorine Niedecker

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible…

— Jean Cocteau

I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down…

— Kevin Keck

If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.

— Andrew Ng

I'm working on poems about work, I guess. Or related to work. Which sounds dull as drywall but I'm having great fun working the…

— Randall Mann

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

— Philip Levine

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

— Cate Marvin

Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.

— Kathleen Raine

“My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”

— Michelle Geaney

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

— Edward Hirsch

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing…

— Philip Levine

The workplace needs the poet's gift. But the poet also needs to be educated about the workplace. You're not just coming in to do…

— David Whyte