I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.
I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
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 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.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
The cliche is dead poetry.
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.
The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one.
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
