Poetry Guts

Speaking Chicken on Snake, colored pencil
drawing by Lenore Goodell ca 1973

Poetry is from the gut of the mind. larry goodell

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Writing is never easy except when inspired. lg

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The less poetry is concerned with the everyday existence and the rhythmic talents of a people, the less readable that poetry is likely to be. Louis Zukofsky

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Form is never more than an extension of content. Robert Creeley

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I think I could say what nobody thought. Gertrude Stein

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No ideas but in things. Dr. William Carlos Williams

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If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. John Keats

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Poetry if anything gives us a sense of everything. Louis Zukofsky

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Poetry convinces not be argument but by the form it creates to carry its content. Zukofsky

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A simple order of speech is an asset in poetry. Zukofsky

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Simplicity of utterance and song go together. Zukofsky

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A lyric has to sing. A poem has to read. Sammy Cohn, lyricist

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Performing is allowing your soul to dance through the instrument you're playing. Stevie Wonder

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When I take a breath and start to move, I construct a sentence. It is what happens when I exhale. A 'sentence' is logical, it has integrity and consistency. It does something. Lee Connor, dancer & choreographer

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These breaths, of course, can and should vary in duration, as they are not literally the length of one breath of the body at rest, but rather like a spoken sentence, with possibly a subclause or two; or, using another comparison, like a melodic line a flutist might play in one breath. Doris Humphrey, dancer & choreographer

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Our religion is the poetry in which we believed. Santayana

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"We are hamstrung by a fear of being miscellaneous. The book-trade, accursed of god, man and nature, makes no provision for any publication that is not one of a series; and masterwork is never one of a series, neither is vital invention. It has its place in the historic process, which is far from the same." from Ezra Pound's letter to John Crowe Ransom, 15Oct38

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Language of poet(ry) often allies itself with song, not oratory. Louis Zukofsky, A Test Of Poetry, 1948 (but I can't now find this in "The Test of Poetry -- lg)

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The complications of rhetorical ornament (similes, metaphors, conceits) in later times seem to have created a printed (and worse, a bookish) poetry written to be read silently rather than to be spoken or sung. Zukofsky

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It is the hardest task for even great poets to limit the number of words used to maximum advantage. Zukofsky

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Condensation is more than half of composition. The rest is proper breathing space, ease, grace. Zukofsky

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As poetry, only objectified emotion endures. Zukofsky

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I was already a convert to the Romantic spirit, and myth in that spirit is not only a story that expresses the soul but a story that awakens the soul to the real persons of its romance, in which the actual and the spiritual are revealed, one in the other. Robert Duncan, p42 The Truth & Life of Myth

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Poetry must be as well written as prose. Ezra Pound, 1885-1972

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Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan 1915, Ezra Pound

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Literature is language charged with meaning. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934

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Literature is news that stays news. Pound

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Poetry is the passionate pursuit of the real. larry goodell

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It's impossible to write of what one has written or lived, except as the day is, out the window, now, explicit. Ken Irby

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I'll publish right or wrong: F ools are my theme, let satire be my song. George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1788-1824

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There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. Gertrude Stein