Poetry Quotes
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I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.
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Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
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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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Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginery being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.
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So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.
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I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
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I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
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On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
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I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.
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I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
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Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
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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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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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I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
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I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.
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A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.
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Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.
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The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.
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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.
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
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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.
