We see them when they come to New York. They stay at my wife’s apartment. We have quite a correspondence with them at all times. They play a very important role, the authors in the firm, because so much of the material we publish is suggested by them. James Laughlin Read Quote
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. James Laughlin Read Quote
We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry. James Laughlin Read Quote
There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it’s a very close relationship. We can do that because we’re so small. James Laughlin Read Quote
The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably. James Laughlin Read Quote
Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn’t want to do a re-write. That’s something we do almost nothing of. James Laughlin Read Quote
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. James Laughlin Read Quote
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. James Laughlin Read Quote
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence. James Laughlin Read Quote
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. James Laughlin Read Quote
