A Quote by Allison Hedge Coke

I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything. — © Allison Hedge Coke
I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything.
I've always loved science, as far back as I can remember. I was very, very curious about how everything worked: the world, the physical universe, chemistry, law. So it was only natural to be curious about how our mind works.
I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.
Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.
Jesus' plan called for action, and how He expressed it predicted its success. He didn't say "you 'might' be my witnesses," or "you 'could' be my witnesses," or even "you 'should' be my witnesses." He said "you 'WILL' be my witnesses.
Being known for Bond, certainly when you're in foreign countries, makes people curious. You get to see presidents because their wives were curious; their children were curious about Bond or The Saint or whatever. Then once you have your foot through the door, you can then let them see that you're serious about what you're talking about, and not just a twit.
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
There's something almost impossible about the criminal justice system when it comes to sexual assault cases. It immediately sets up a trial, where witnesses may have been drunk or maybe there were no witnesses and maybe there's no evidence.
I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed. What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
You need to be curious one way or another as a designer. Your eye has to stay curious. I look at people and think about how they live. I think about bodies.
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.
I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
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