Poetry Quotes
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When I came into consciousness as a writer when I was in my early 20s, I just assumed that a writer did - a poet writer did everything all at once. I would write poetry, and while writing poetry I would also write work in the world - if I could get into the world.
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If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.
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Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions.
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Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized.
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Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.
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The collective love for music and poetry and just the brotherhood of sound. And it's still kind of flowing through me and I attribute that to the team.
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I read poetry to save time.
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When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
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I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.
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As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
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The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
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I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
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And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
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None of these worlds was incompatible. All of these people were around, and if you were at all interested in painting, poetry, or dance, you met them.
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In the heart’s rain in the eye’s fog in the winter’s smoky snow in whirling snow in storms wind which wants to tear my coat off legends stories the blood red dawn of the mind the warm spring between your thighs the only haven
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I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.
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For me, poetry is a form of activism. And that word enables the labelers, and also gives them a rash.
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There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating qualityof the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.
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I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.
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I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.
