the poet says, the poet does

"A word on Academies; poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don´t understand how it´s made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn´t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight."

Allen Ginsberg, "Notes for Howl and Other Poems", 1959.

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"Cada palavra tem sua história, sua biografia, sua etimologia. Seu uso deflagra uma constelação de sub-significados e sentidos que, em cada idioma particular, tem certo desenho próprio e intransferível. A palavra é, essencialmente, política. Portanto, ética. Daí, talvez, a dificuldade de transformar a literatura, a poesia, em mercadoria."

Paulo Leminski, "Arte in-útil, arte livre?" in Anseios Crípticos, 1986.

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"Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now thinking - not what someone once thought. We make with what we have, and in this way anything is worth looking at. A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more."

Robert Creeley, "To Define" in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, 1989.

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"Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it; we possess nothing."

John Cage, "Introduction to Themes & Variations", 1982.

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"I love getting the body into my writing, especially to subvert ideas like `pure thought´."

Rosmarie Waldrop, "Interview-conversation with Joan Retallack"