Poetry Quotes
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Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, 'What man does with his aloneness.'
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Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
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Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
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I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
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You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
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Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
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The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
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Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.
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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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I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
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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 wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
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I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
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We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
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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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Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.
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If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'
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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
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Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learned at college - and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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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 is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
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And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
