Robert Pinsky

"Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular."

"The poet is a particular kind of expert."

"Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever underta…"

"Each work of art generate its own rules"

"An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art."

"The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process."

"I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it’s held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is…"

"Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? …"