FLORENCE TONK

Writing poetry is what I like best. Because it is so honest. Quite a lot of work things are less honest. One has to give in. In poetry that's not necessary. You only have to comply with your own demands.



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SAMUEL JOHNSON

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.



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HORACE

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.



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JOHN RUSKIN

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.



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KHALIL GIBRAN

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.



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LEONARD NOLENS

Pre-eminently, poetry is possessing the discipline to do nothing at all, to cultivate the right to idleness.



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ROBERT-EDWARD HART (1891- 1954)

There is a time to sing, a time to dance
and a time to accomplish one’s life in pure
serenity and peace.



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PAUL VALÉRY

One never finishes a poem, one abandons it.



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ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Many contemporary poets think poetry is a linguistic game. For me it is -other than philosophy but with the same power- a way to deal with the main questions.



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CHARLES SIMIC

I proclaim the hermeneutics of the perfectly clear. Its ambition is to find hidden opacities in the brightest sunlight.



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MUSTAFA STITOU

The openess of poems, their ambiguity and complexity must be protected. If you try to explain the poem, you frame it. You fixate. Why would you do that?

Mustafa Stitou



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ERNST JÜNGER

In trance the mind can penetrate further and more adventurously, more directly. It collects experience in the infinite. Without such an experience poetry can't exist.



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HANS ANDREUS (1926 - 1977)

The poets don't know what they don't know. They speak in their strange language.



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CHARLES LECONTE DE LISLE (1818 - 1864)

All elegiacs are contemptible.



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CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (6)

There is nothing more precious in the world than the poetic spirit, and a sense of chivalry.



The common herd are lovers, poets are idolaters.



They tell of poets who all their lives fixed their eyes upon on beloved image. I believe indeed (but I am biased) that fidelity is one of the signs of genius.



Our neighbours say: Shakespeare and Goethe! We can respond: Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier!



Only three beings deserve our respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.



The absolute drug, is Poetry.


Also see:
Frozen Poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



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HERMAN VAN ROMPUY

Haiku doesn't change your life, but because your life is changing, you reach haiku.



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PERCEY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792 - 1822) 2

Poetry acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness.



Poetry differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the active powers of the mind and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness or will.


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SIMON VESTDIJK (1898 - 1971)

Poetry is a vertical phenomenon, prose a horizontal phenomenon.

From: De glanzende kiemcel


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WILLIAM BLAKE (1757 - 1827)

I am not ashamed , afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told: that I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily and Nightly; but the nature of such things is not, as some suppose, without trouble or care.

From: Letters


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NIC VAN BRUGGEN (2)

Poetry has no truth, not anything to determine, it only has itself. It is nothing and yet it is there. One must have a special gift to discover that nothing.


From: 'Portret van een jonge man als een dichter', De Periscoop, ed. July-August 1962, Brussels.




The real poet is a creator, he himself produces what we call the poetic, which he doens’t express in the poem, but writes right through the poem. So, the poem is not the sediment of a poetic experience, but the poetic experience is the poem’s result.



From: 'Portret van een jonge man als dichter, De Periscoop, 1962.





Sent by Bert Bevers
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EMERENZ MEIER (1874 - 1928)

If Goethe had had to prepare supper, salt the dumplings;
If Schiller had had to wash the dishes;
If Heine had had to mend what he had torn,
to clean the rooms, kill the bugs-
Oh, the menfolk, none of them would have become great poets.



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JOS STEEGSTRA (1940 - 2002) 2

Poetry is living after an ice age, beginning all over again without materials: I enter the process of being called and give names.



Poets are not silent but keep still about what I am looking for: an unpolished, hard core to live with, to die with.



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OLAF DOUWES DEKKER

Writing a poem concerns a painful area, a graze, an open nerve which only closes when you know you shouldn't alter one more word, that everything you wanted to say has been said.



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HERMAN DE CONINCK (1944 - 1997) 2

I believe poetry is the science of missing.



Poetry is the only domain where ignorance can beat academicism.



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LUDO ABICHT

Who doesn't believe in miracles, can't be considered a realist.

Sent by Bert Bevers



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GUIDO LAUWAERT

A poem is a photograph, the poet however is the dark room.

Sent by Bert Bevers


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W.H. AUDEN (1907 - 1973) 2

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.



A poet will always have a sneaking regard for luck because he knows the role which it plays in poetic composition. Something unexpected is always turning up, and though he knows that the Censor (in him) has to pass it, the memory of the lucky dip is what he treasures.



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ROBERT ANKER

As soon as a poem becomes considerably longer than a page, it loses concentration: more beacons, less open spaces, more univocal, more epic, more linear.



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GOTTFRIED BENN (1886 - 1956) 2

Art: the ashes of the mind.



The poem is ready before it has come into existence; it's just that the author doesn't know his tekst yet.


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DEREK WALCOTT (2)

What one admires in good poetry, is craftsmanship. Poets don't look at each other for some philosophical meaning they give to life but they look at technical skills. Workmanship of the medium, that is what can be appreciated with others.



I believe in everyone who can deal with caesura in poems. Who can handle rhythm, is able to give a poem any form.



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C.O. JELLEMA (1936 - 2003)

No, the poet doesn't believe in anything. He would like to believe. It's through the poem he hopes to believe in something. Certainties in these poems are to be considered hope or wishes. The poem itself believes. But something which renders the poem credible, doesn't have to be that for the maker. Look: you don't write poems about things that are obvious for you. Then they would just become little tracts. A poem tries, follows a path, is something you don't know for yourself, or something you don't believe in yet. In that sense a poem shapes its creator. After each succesful poem he has become a different person.

Jellema, talking about his book 'Ongeroepen'.



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JAN EIJKELBOOM (2)

When I write about difficult issues in a poem, I end up in a rigid form as a matter of course; it otherwise will get out of hand.



Writing poetry means to me: victory. Blood.


Jan Eijkelboom



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IDA GERHARDT (2)

A poem needs to have a centre of gravity, there must be axes and structures, like in a snow crystal; or put it differently: a poem should have the structure of a flower. It is an organism.



Communication belongs to the essence of poetry and is by no means an incidental circumstance.



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CEES BUDDINGH' (1918 - 1985)

A poem only comes into existence when it is being read. But each time it is read it begins a new life. And in a different way.



Sent by Bert Bevers



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GEORGE OPPEN (1908 - 1984)

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.



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CHARLES OLSON (2)

Form is never more than an expression of content.



Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content towards its form.



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GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON (1874 - 1936)

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.



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REMCO CAMPERT

Poetry is listening backward and looking forward.



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RICHARD FOQUÉ

The poem rewrites itself
it can't speak
just letters becoming words
like digits a number



From: De Grote Rokade, 2012.



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HANS DEKKERS

Poetry wants to say something to us but what it is she wants to say remains hidden, although we feel its presence. It is not vague, on the contrary, it's quite concrete what poems do with us. That’s what makes poetry attractive and therefore I’m inclined to dedicate myself to this higher form of stammering.



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TEUNTJE KNÖPS

Poetry is writing inside out.



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JOHN ASHBERRY

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.



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ANESTIS EVANGELOU (1937 - 1994)

There are many roads leading to poetry - each real poet clears his own path.



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FRANS MINK (1950 - 2013) 2

When I have a final line in mind
I try to write a poem with it
and when I have a first line
it may become a story

sometimes I just have a line.



Is the poet a Titan suffering from acrophobia or a heron with fear of flying?



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JASPER MIKKERS

Once they were mine, these poems.
What they accomplish in heart and eyes now,
I will never know.
When I finished them, they forgot about me.



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NORBERT DE BEULE

Poetry is a heightened form of keeping silent.


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ANDRÉ GIDE

'Therefore' is a word the poet should not know.


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HUGO CLAUS

Poetry has no standards. Poetry danses on the rhythm of the moment.



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PHILIPPE CAILLIAU (5)

As long as the poet writes, he remains in charge. But when the reader reads well, it will be him to command.



A poem is yesterday's weather report for tomorrow's reader.



The mysterie of creating a work of art: one thinks to know how to begin, one knows where to go – but one never knows where it all ends.


A poem is a good place to have a shower.



Poets have a good nose for those things that don't exist yet.



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MARTINUS NIJHOFF

How I write a poem? Quite simply, like a rooster lays an egg.



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KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

What is lost in a good or excellent translation is precisely the best.



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CATHARINA BOER

Poetry is a slumbering thought which wakes up on rhythm and sound.



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ALBERT HAGENAARS (3)

Time is money is miles is experiences is poetry is time.


A poem is a mechanism consisting of signs, sounds, images and symbols, which turns into an organism getting hold of you as soon as you recognize the beauty, truth and enigma's that are already in you.


Writing poetry while traveling is far more important to me than traveling while writing poetry.



Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

ARISTOTLE

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.



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ITALO CALVINO

Poetry is the art to catch the sea in a single glass.



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