Quotes About Language

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

Fat is fat. This goes back to the word 'plus.' We describe things. We are humans, and we need to describe things.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

A really good poem is full of music.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

They're very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn't think they would be, but they are.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

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 had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

I was an English major, and I always wrote poems.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it's this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.