Poetry Quotes
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Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
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One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.
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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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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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Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
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Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
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When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way.
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Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
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Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
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A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
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I have my books And my poetry to protect me; I am shielded in my armor, Hiding in my room, safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.
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Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
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There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
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Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
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No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
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I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
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While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
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Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
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I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'
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Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
