Quotes About Understanding

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

Take the blinders from your visiontake the padding from your earsand confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears.

I've never met anyone who loves in the same way. But that's the beauty of finding the heart meant for yours. The right love will accept the 'not so lovable' parts of you too.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Faith has answers that the ears can't always hear.

Words have never belonged to those who wrote them. Always to those who needed then.

We look at your eyes. The eyes carry the wounds. The eyes know damage. Damaged people recognize other damaged people, and we let you in. We are kindred. - Broken Places

Poetry should be like 'Uh-huh. Baby has to have it.

The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.

Speak without words. Know the weight of words

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.