It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.
Poetry can’t give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
I guess the thing that I’m most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It’s the source of my creativity.
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
The crown of literature is poetry.
The creative act amazes me. Whether it’s poetry, whether it’s music, it’s an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.
I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he’s going to write poetry or songs.
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I’d like to publish it someday.
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists – Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.
I’ve often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it’s been doing to my poetry when I’m not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
I just submitted what I had to the ‘Octopus Books’ contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it’s harder to write. It’s harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently – his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh – and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs – not only politics but poetry – was very important; he took it as a vocation.
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
