Quotes About Culture

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

Traditional paintings have few figures in them and value negative space. Japanese calligraphy and brush paintings are in black and white. Haiku is the shortest poem form in the world. These are a few examples of a minimalistic aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.'

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.

In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.

Shakespeare is, after all, Britain's greatest poet and dramatist.

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

In 'Blindspotting' I play a girl from Oakland, I've got an accent, I've got long, '90s 'Poetic Justice' braids, and in 'Monsters and Men' I play a girl from Brooklyn.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.