Poetry Quotes
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Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
Lisel Mueller
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Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.
Josephine Hart
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My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.
John Barton
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Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.
Benedetto Croce
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My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.
Billy Collins
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When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
John Fuller
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It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
David Whyte
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Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.
John Darnielle
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
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If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
J. D. Salinger
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Poetry allows me to write about what I don't know, whereas journalism demands a higher level of certainty to be worthy of being written.
Eliza Griswold
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I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
Pavement
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As musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.
Brian Molko
Placebo
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While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.
Jane Yolen
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You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
Lena Dunham
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All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
