I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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.
For me, poetry is always a search for order.
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
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.
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
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.
I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.
