Poetry Quotes
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Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
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To be honest, I wasn't crazy about the kind of poetry I found in high school English books. I didn't get really excited about poetry until I discovered Lorca in college. If it wasn't for surrealism, I'm not sure I'd have become so involved in poetry. I was attracted by the extravagant imagery and elements of fantasy. This was in the '70s and it seemed to fit the psychedelic mood of the times. I found it liberating.
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Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.
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If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
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The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
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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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I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
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I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
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The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.
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People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.
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If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.
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Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
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I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
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I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
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Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.
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For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal. The tiny incidents of daily rouitine are as much a commentary of racial ideas as the highest flight of philosophy or poetry.
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There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.
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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
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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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One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.
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Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
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The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
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We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
