In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.
I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.
Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.
Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
Superstition is the poetry of life.
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.