35 Quotes by James Laughlin

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.