Quote

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

James Laughlin

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James Laughlin
Age: 83 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 30
Died: 1997
Died: November 12
Editor
Poet
Publisher
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
James Laughlin IV
Goes
Saying
Idea
Ideas
Whole
Needs
Conceit
Thing
Poem
Long
Necessary

More quotes by James Laughlin

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I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
James Laughlin
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It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.
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Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
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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.
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