Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (10)

from an interview with Toi Derricotte (the interviewers were eighth graders)

Ms. Derricotte: I used to hang out with groups of people who were what they called "beatniks." And beatniks were like people in the fifties, who were really intellectuals. They liked to read, they liked to talk about ideas, play chess, they like jazz. People like that. What are people like that called now? 

Joseph: Old-timers?

from Galsan Tschinag

Defence of poetry thus means: defence of humanity, defence of authenticity, it means defence of the stone against plaster, defence of wood against plastic, defence of the word of the mother tongue against the foreign word, the technical jargon, defence of feeling against hypocrisy and finally defence of everything real and true against the fashion of the day and intentional lies.

from Yusef Komunyakaa

Emotional texture is drawn from the aesthetics of insinuation and nuance. But to do this well the poet has to have a sense of history.

from Baron Wormser

If T. S. Eliot's weirdly magisterial poem The Waste Land were cast into the form of a television show, what would it look like?

from Bei Dao

an alien voice sneaking into the dictionary
a dissident
perhaps a form of distance from the world

from Elizabeth McElrea

On the subject of drugs Auden speaks from experience. His criticisms of marijuana use are that it reduces coherence, inflates egos, and for the young especially, prevents one from discovering his own identity. Artistically, he found the experience uncommunicatable and hence useless. With LSD, "nothing happened."

from Charles Bernstein

My poetry doesn't convey what I know, it explores the conditions of how I know it.

from Jack Wiler

This is high school. 

And since it's high school every fucking one of them has to pretend that nothing happens outside their door. They have to act like mommy and daddy are nice and the kids are okay and it's a good idea to invade various small countries and the best way to get along is go along and so we can't have any fucking, queer, poet, shithead going around saying cunt in front of the kids because god knows where that would lead.