I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
We think that there is this terrible idea that the kids are digital natives... and they know what they're doing, but all the evidence says that they're hanging around going, 'Where are you, I'm here, can I post my picture?' They're not actually writing wikis; they're not actually listening to great poets live.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis.
