Quotes About Challenge

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

I've had the wind knocked out of me, but never the hurricane

Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

The poem is a plank laid over the lion's den.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.

Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn't it?

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?