Poetry Quotes
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And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.
I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.
All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.
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.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
When I first heard Bob Dylan, I'll be honest, I didn't like him. But I was shallow of mind and didn't understand the poetry. I just judged him on his singing and his guitar playing.
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.
Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.
When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.
I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.
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.
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
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.
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.
Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.
I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
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