Poetry Quotes
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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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It is not the word that is the original material of poetry, rather the letter.
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I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
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Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
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The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
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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 think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to.
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I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.
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My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.
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I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
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No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
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A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.
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You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality.
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We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.
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I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
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I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.
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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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For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
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Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.
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Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
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You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.
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I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
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Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
