On Poetry Quotes

I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.

I got you a present." "Did you?" "It's a book of poetry--romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

Ive always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

San Francisco is poetry. Even the hills rhyme.

The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.

I wanted to remember the original energy; strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.

I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

What I wanted to do in rock'n'roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.

In love, a verse of Mimnermus has more power than one of Homer.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

When I read poetry, I read it aloud. It's so much better that way.

Poetry is a subset of a Cosmos, which in itself, is a poem.

I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

Ennius was the father of Roman poetry, because he first introduced into Latin the Greek manner and in particular the hexameter metre.

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.

God must love art because most of the Bible is expressed in the form of story or poetry.