Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
America’s liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.
Most people can’t tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.
I’m pretty much all for poetry in public places – poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.
You just go where poetry is, whether it’s in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there’s live poetry or recordings.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called ‘real world’ of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
God is the perfect poet.
As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well.
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
When you’re 15, you’re not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting – not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it’s no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it’s really just about the money, the perceived prestige.