65 Quotes by Robert Pinsky

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator – that has always been strong in me.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet’s voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Poetry’s medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It’s bodily.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it – in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.