Poetry Quotes
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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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I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.
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I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.
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Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
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When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.
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Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.
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A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
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Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
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In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.
Anita Brookner -
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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Poetry is a form of necessary speech.
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I was quiet, and I was artistic. I liked writing poetry, and that was very strange, so I was bullied a lot.
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Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
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I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
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The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
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Prose is in fact the museum where the dead images of verse are preserved. In 'Notes', prose is 'a museum where all the old weapons of poetry kept.
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'Then one can't make a living out of poetry?''Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.'
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Political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks tenderness. It lacks poetry. It doesn't nurture. It doesn't love. And without those things, a woman's soul is bereft.
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To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
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I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.
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A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
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I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
