Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
I don't want to bury anything in poetry.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
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.
Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.
When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
