Home > Work > A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry QUOTES

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry QUOTES

1 " Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what’s important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

2 " when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

3 " because you’ve chosen poetry, you’re condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

4 " Not all engagement with our past is characterized by crisis. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

5 " A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That’s a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

6 " If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

7 " I’m actually after another notion here—what I’ve called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet. "

― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry