Poetry Quotes
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As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
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We have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.
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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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The secret of poetry is cruelty.
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I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
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Whether we call it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls.
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Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
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Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great - go buy it.
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If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
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I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
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Winter's notion of poetry is tragedy. It knows nothing of comedy. Its laughter was frozen on its lips long ago.
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Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
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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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Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
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Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
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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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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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Sometimes the beauty is easy.Sometimes you don't have to try at all.Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake.Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
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Poetry is composing for the breath.
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That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
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My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
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My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
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It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
