Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
When you're 15, you're not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting - not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.
My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.
You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
I'll try anything, but the pig testicles in Taiwan were a little much. Eh, it wasn't half bad. There was this one dish I had there, the translation is, 'The Monk Jumps over the Fence.' It's a fish dish with all these spices. It was beautiful, man - it was poetry. It had a whole story.