Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It's very rare that I play a game where I'm like, 'Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.'
Love is the poetry of the senses.
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
I like art; if I could just draw pictures all day, I would, but I can't; I'm horrible. I practiced at it, still didn't get better - gave it up. I'm good with words, though, so I write music, poetry; sometimes I just journal in my phone.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.