Poetry Quotes
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Sholeh Wolpé poetry proves to be rumination, prayer, song.
Nathalie Handal
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I am interested in beauty. I think with beauty comes poetry, comes the lyrical. I think beauty is concerned with justice…
Nilo Cruz
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Let all Black Poets die as trumpets,
And be buried in the dust of marching feet.
Etheridge Knight
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To paraphrase Robin Williams’s compelling teacher character in Dead Poets Society: We don’t study poetry to get an “A,” to graduate, to get a job, to make money, to meet material needs. Rather, “we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering . . . these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love . . . these are what we stay alive for.
Benjamin E. Sasse
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My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
Harry Mathews
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Whatever you do, find ways to read poerty. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.
Eve Merriam
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Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
Michael Tippett
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I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Norman MacCaig
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
Ezra Pound
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There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio Montale
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With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
Stephen Malkmus
Pavement
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The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.
Paul Muldoon
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Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound
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People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.
Simon Armitage
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In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.
Nathaniel Dorsky
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In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.
Elaine Equi
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Poetry teaches us how to live in a world in which none of us belongs.
Dennis Nurkse
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For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Eugenio Montale