Poetry Quotes
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I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
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It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
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Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
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I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
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As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
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Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
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I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.
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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.
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.
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Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.
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Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
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My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.
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I wrote a lot of poetry that was based on stories of the sea and I was really inspired by that.
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
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I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
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Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
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Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
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Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
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Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.
