And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
It's more fun to have a name rather than a number. I think this gives our products a personality. I get the names from literature, movies, opera, traveling, nature, poetry, sometimes even the street. I keep a small book that I write in. I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down a name for a lipstick or an eyeshadow.
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
The cliche is dead poetry.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.
Poetry is life distilled.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.