Poetry Quotes: Poetry and Truth

If poetry breaks its covenant with truth and justice, it has failed. --Seamus Heaney, The Sunday Tribune, 7 April 1996

It's important that it's clear that the poet is not inventing the value of something ordinary or unexceptional but revealing the value. --Eavan Boland, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1988

Poems know something that we as the creators of poems don't know. This may just be the force of a thing that is finished compared to one that is still developing, the force of order in contrast to disorder, the force of something elevated out of time compared to the casual. --Agnes Nemes Nagy, A Hungarian Perspective, 1998

The making of poems is mysteriously tied up with not-knowing, with willing ignorance and an openness to mutation. --Tony Hoagland, The American Poetry Review, July-August 2003

For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it. --Jorie Graham, cited in Newsweek, 12 April 2004.

Once you've written a line on the page, that poem has its own lifeforce that needs to be realized. It now becomes utterly irrelevant what really happened. --Campbell McGrath, Sundog, Fall 1999

Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life. --David Alpaugh, Poets & Writers, March-April 2003

Everything I commit to paper is part of a lifelong process of making myself at home in a mysterious and deceptive world. To tell a deliberate lie in building this metaphysical home would be as grievous an error in using bad mortar or unseasoned timbers in the construction of a house. --John Burnside, The Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2006

To me it's always open house; if you want it and it doesn't exist, just make it up. --Philip Levine, So Ask, 2002

Poetry is against lying, against evasion and shoddiness of speech. Against all the ways of speaking and writing which reduce our humanity, narrow our sympathies, wither our ability to think and feel. Against all the forces of cretinization. Poetry is an intrinsic fight-back against all that. --Adam Kirsch, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2006

*******************************

These quotes are excerpted from a recent anthology: Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, by Dennis O'Driscoll, Copper Canyon Press, 2008, from the chapter entitled "The Whole Truth."

*******************************

For more poetry quotes, visit http://poetryquotes.gather.com/