So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
Every single soul is a poem.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve enjoyed.
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
I’ve done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I’ve compiled a book of poetry that’s completed, and two others I’m working on.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
Poetry is meant to be heard.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn’t appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
Around 10 years old I started being into church and being around the church. I started doing poetry – I was doing all clean poetry, totally clean.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn’t agree with Bly that it’s a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
I’m hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career – they are so fun and witty.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
What a great poem teaches you – and it’s not intellectual at all – is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
Actually, I’m working on a book of poetry.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Poetry is not the language we live in. It’s not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn’t the language to which commercial value has been assigned.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
