Top 15 Robert Pinsky Quotes

Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular.

An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.

The poet is a particular kind of expert.

The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process.

A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles.

There are no rules but uniformity can make it seem as though there are rules.

Each work of art generate its own rules

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art.

It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order.

Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

That physical tingle, that powerful audible experience(not with poets projecting their work to an audience) but more intimate, less planned than that.

Poetry is a vocal art for me, not neccessarilyperformative, it might be reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory.The speaker bringing their own experience to it,changing it with their own sensibility.

All the mysteries of consciousness flower in the body.