Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry

In 1987, Dennis O'Driscoll began collecting contemporary remarks that "cut to the nub of some poetry-related topic or put a bright new gloss on old chestnuts." His habit evolved into a regular and very popular column, "Poetry Pickings and Choosings." Quote Poet Unquote offers multiple (and often conflicting) responses to myriad questions about poetry, poetics, and the writing process. As O'Driscoll writes in his introduction: "This is a populous and polyphonous book, too-a chorus of hundreds of voices... from daily newspapers and literary monthlies, radio broadcasts and weblogs, small-circulation poetry periodicals and sources as unlikely as the Irish Farmers Journal, Vogue, and Harper's & Queen... Some of these quotations are so eloquent in construction and so economic in language as to come close to the status of poetry itself."