A Quote by Amiri Baraka

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Amiri Baraka

Quote Topics

Experience Giving Immediacy Immediately Interested Poet Sense Someone Think

Quote Author

Amiri Baraka
American - Poet
October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014

A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

Billy Collins

An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . .

Stephen Spender

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

Clive James

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

Eavan Boland

Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).

Ron Padgett

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Chuck Palahniuk

Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

Frantz Fanon

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

Edith Sitwell

Anything that someone's interested in should be very, very easy to call up onto the screen. And in fact the computer over time will see what you're interested in and make that immediately available without your having to be give any commands at all.

Bill Gates

I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me. I think of myself as someone who makes particular interventions into genres that already exist.

Douglas A. Martin

I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.

Diane di Prima

You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and then I'm giving you sadness and guilt.

Chelsea Cain

I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.

Charlie Kaufman

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.