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In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

 

Michael Schmidt (poet)

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Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

 

Robert Pinsky

 

Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

 

Dana Gioia

 

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

 

Randall Jarrell

 

Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

 

Jorge Luis Borges