There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
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.
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.
I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
I read poetry to save time.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
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.
When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.
I believe that poetry should communicate.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
