Poetry Quotes
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Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
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There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
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…a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse…. Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher.
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Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
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Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.
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Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
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I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.
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It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
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If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.
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Oh sky, without me, do not change, Oh moon, without me, do not shine; Oh earth, without me, do not grow, Oh time, without me, do not go. ...Oh, you cannot go, without me.
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Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
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Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.
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Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
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Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
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Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.
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When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
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Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.
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Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
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The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.
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We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
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If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.
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Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.
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We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
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There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around. That the colt from Old Regret had got away.
