Poetry Quotes
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When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.
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Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
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I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
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For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
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Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars.
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Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.
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True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.
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Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
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I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.
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I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.
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There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.
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Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
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A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
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There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
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Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.
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Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your promise was my prayer Your hypocrisy my nightmare And your problems fill my present Are we both going somewhere?
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When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.
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Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
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In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.
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When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.
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Love is an irresistable desire to be irresistably desired. Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
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Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
