I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed; I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.
The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania.
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
