Poetry Quotes
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There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
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Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.
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All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?
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Poetry: the best words in the best order.
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know; 'Tis only infinite below.
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Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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.
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Let yourself becoming living poetry
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In poetry you can leave out everything but the truth.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
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This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.
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Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.
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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.
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Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.
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I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?
Etel Adnan -
It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
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The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.
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Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
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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.
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Poetry has a small audience, but a large influence.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
