On Poetry Quotes

Each man has his own batch of poems.

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

How fortunate we are to exist in the moneyless economy of poetry! When you take money out of the equation, anything goes and nobody cares. It's truly free.

The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

Part of what I try to do in schools is take poetry off of a pedestal and make it a little more accessible and approachable.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.

One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

I want to welcome folks to poetry, especially those who may have previously felt unwelcome; I want to celebrate everyone who is trying to make sense of this world through poetry the way I try to.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.

I've got feathers in my hair, I get down to beat poetry.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.

Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.

Poetry and I fit together. I can't imagine being without it... It is food and drink, it is all seasons, it is the stuff of all existence.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?

[I've] learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness.

I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

Poetry is a popular genre in Afghanistan. If you turned on the radio, there would be a poetry program that would be as popular as The Real Housewives.

Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

To me, poetry is a rational act. I never write a poem if I'm not sure what I am going to say or what I want to communicate.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

in Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.