On Poetry Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

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.

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

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

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

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each man has his own batch of poems.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry

R&b, poetry, I'd like to do everything. But I'm an entertainer and entertaining is not just music. I can do comedy; I'm one of those guys, I can stand up there with a mic. I'm not gonna freeze.

Poetry is God's work.

I didn't go out on one date in high school. I played guitar and sang and wrote my own music and poetry and stuff when I was a teenager.

As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.

Take this squirrel, for instance. Ulysses. Do I believe he can type poetry? Sure, I do believe it. There is much more beauty in the world if I believe such a thing is possible.

I've always felt that a really good joke, a really good one-liner, is a really good line of poetry. It's imagistic, it's compact, there is a rhythm to it.

You'll never know that you had all of me. You'll never know the poetry you've stirred in me.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy.

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.

Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

Most Americans do not like poetry. We may respect it, but we do not enjoy it.

History after all is the true poetry.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.