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James Laughlin Quotes

James Laughlin Quotes & Quotations
Name:
James Laughlin
Type:
Poet
Nationality:
American
Birth day:
Birth year:

  • 1
    Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 2
    Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 3
    I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 4
    I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 5
    I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 6
    I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 7
    I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 8
    I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 9
    I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 10
    I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 11
    It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 12
    Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 13
    Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 14
    Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 15
    There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 16
    We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin
  • 17
    We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry. James-LaughlinJames Laughlin