Quotes About Communication

Poetry cannot be translation

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

The poetry of speech.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

I don't want to bury anything in poetry.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.