A Quote by Elliott Colla

Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

Elliott Colla

Quote Topics

Bad Great Great Poet Great Poetry Guise Horrible Poetry Politics Utopian Wrapped

Quote Author

Elliott Colla

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

Robert Hass

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

Langston Hughes

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

Richard M. Nixon

Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.

Elliott Colla

Poetry is always in transformation. There are certain aspects of contemporary Italian poetry that are very preoccupied with politics and deconstruction and they don't deeply interest me. But that's the case in most cultures. We have our own Language Poetry, which doesn't interest me either.

Jonathan W. Galassi

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Anatole Broyard

No one should do politics in the guise of Hindutva and teach us what Hindutva is.

Uddhav Thackeray

I'm like really bad at like remembering all these things, but basically we finished...we wrapped in August and we locked in February. It was like we did our first friends and family screening I would say 8-weeks after we locked...after we wrapped or 8-weeks after we wrapped.

Nicholas Stoller

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

Adrienne Rich

Those of us who work in politics can only make ourselves useful if our heads are filled with things that we can contribute to the political space. JFK had this quote about how if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew about politics, the world would be a better place. Being attentive to the things that add meaning to our lives alongside politics will help us inform our politics with the values that really do make America great.

Peter Buttigieg

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.