Poetry Quotes
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I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.
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It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.
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I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.
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People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
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You're in high school, and you're telling your friends that you're skipping lunch to go write poetry, and they were all questioning my sexuality.
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For me, poetry is always a search for order.
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I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.
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Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem - don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer. If most poetry doesn’t seem to be in any sense confessional, it’s because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it’s almost entirely successful.
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Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
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I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
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I'm not dismayed that poetry's appeal is limited in scope. That's why we have National Poetry Month. It's a sign of its neglect, which isn't necessarily a negative thing. It's not like we have National TV Month.
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I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.
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A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
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I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
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You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.
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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
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Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
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Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
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Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will.
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Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.
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For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
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I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
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I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
