Peter Boyle

from
museum of SPACE, 2004, University of Queensland Press, Qld.
p. 99

Of Poetry

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.

They carry their openness

with both hands.

If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway

they step briskly past.

The boom of generals

and presidents with their rhetoric manuals

will go on sowing the wind.

The great poems are distrustful of speech.

Quietly,

like someone very old

who has only a few hours left of human time,

they gaze into the faces around them -

one by one

they kiss love into our mouths. 

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/boyle-peter 

http://cordite.org.au/reviews/bev-braune-reviews-peter-boyle/

Tony Harrison

From Permanently Bard
Edited by Carol Rutter
1995 
Bloodaxe Books, UK

p. 33

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry - 
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

from Notes
p. 124

The poet Stephen Spender ... remarks that this little epigraph explains 'the accident of a poet's having been born into [a] working class family' by offering 'an ironic theory of psychological compensation.' Spender says he is tempted to regard Harrison almost as 'a changeling, not out of some other social class but perhaps out of Shakespearean romance, sneaked into a cradle in some house in a back street in Leeds by some royal parent (poetry being royal) anxious to disembarrass herself or himself of an unwanted offspring.'  ... his remarks are endearing, but they are also ironically revealling. By assuming that the poet rocked in a working-class cradle must be a changeling Spender nurses the notion that Harrison's poetry strangles the utterance, that 'Poetry's the speech of kings.' Uncle Joe and Uncle Harry ...keep returning ...  the stutterer and the mute are the influences who preside over Harrison's effort to turn 'mute ingloriousness' into poetry.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jul/18/rediscovering-tony-harrison

Peter Daniel Steele, AM: priest, poet, academic

"Publishing a poem is like dropping a feather down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."

from Obituaries, The Age,  3 July 2012

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/things-can-only-get-better/3583064

Charles Simic

from

Why I Still Write Poetry

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/15/why-i-still-write-poetry/

"When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts."

"The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going."

from 

Eternity's Orphans

Do you remember telling me,
'Everything outside this moment is a lie'?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water's edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea

http://cordite.org.au/reviews/ali-alizadeh-reviews-charles-simic/

http://eyelashroaming.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/i-love-my-leather-jacket/

Jay Parini

Jay Parini talking to Ramona Koval on Radio National Book Show

"... it was kind of transformative for me because I think I had grown a little cynical about poetry at times and had forgotten how important it is on the most gut-basic level how this language can really tighten our grip on experience and give us a kind of purchase on the world and help us to think about choices and things we do.

                                                 

... there's hardly a day of my life that some lines of poetry don't come into my head and kind of inform some aspect of my experience in that day  ...  without these concrete images we're walking around in a kind of nebulous world. I don't feel rooted unless I've been writing and reading poetry in the morning. For 40 years now, I get up in the morning ... go to a local cafe and I'd begin my day always ... by reading a poem."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/jay-parini-on-why-poetry-matters/3195782